Iseult was with the army, walking with Hild and with Eanflaed who had upset Ælswith by insisting on following Leofric. The women led packhorses which carried the army's shields, food and spare spears. Nearly every woman was equipped with some kind of weapon. Even Hild, a nun, wanted to take revenge on the Danes who had whored her and so carried a long, narrow-bladed knife.


'God help the Danes,' Father Pyrlig had said when he saw the women gather, 'if that lot get among them.'


He and I now trotted eastwards. I had horsemen ringing the column, riding on every crest, staying in sight of each other, and ready to signal if they saw any sign of the enemy, but there was none. We rode or marched under a spring sky, through a land bright with flowers, and the priests and monks kept up their chanting, and sometimes the men behind, who followed Alfred's two standard-bearers, would start singing a battle song.


Father Pyrlig beat his hand in time to the singing, then gave me a big grin. 'I expect Iseult sings to you, doesn't she?'


'She does.'


'We Britons love to sing! I must teach her some hymns.' He saw my sour look and laughed. 'Don't worry, Uhtred, she's no Christian.'


'She isn't?' I asked, surprised.


'Well, she is, for the moment. I'm sorry you didn't come to her baptism. It was cold, that water! Fair froze me!'


'She's baptised,' I said, 'but you say she's no Christian?'


'She is and she isn't,' Pyrlig said with a grin. 'She is now, see, because she's among Christians. But she's still a shadow queen, and she won't forget it.'


'You believe in shadow queens?'


'Of course I do! Good God, man! She is one!' He made the sign of the cross.


'Brother Asser called her a witch,' I said, 'a sorceress.'


'Well he would, wouldn't he? He's a monk! Monks don't marry. He's terrified of women, Brother Asser, unless they're very ugly and then he bullies them. But show him a pretty young thing and he goes all addled. And of course he hates the power of women.'


'Power?'


'Not just tits, I mean. God knows tits are powerful enough, but the real thing. Power! My mother had it. She was no shadow queen, mind you, but she was a healer and a scryer.'


'She saw the future?'


He shook his head. 'She knew what was happening far off. When my father died she suddenly screamed. Screamed fit to kill herself because she knew what had happened. She was right, too. The poor man was cut down by a Saxon. But she was best as a healer. Folk came to her from miles around.


It didn't matter that she was born a Saxon, they'd walk for a week to fetch the touch of her hand. Me? I got it for free! She banged me about, she did, and I dare say I deserved it, but she was a rare healer.

And, of course, the priests don't like that.'


'Why not?'


'Because we priests tell folk that all power comes from God, and if it doesn't come from God then it must be evil, see? So when folk are ill the church wants them to pray and to give the priests money.

Priests don't like it when they don't understand things, and they don't like folk going to the women to be healed. But what else are folk to do? My mother's hand, God rest her Saxon soul, was better than any prayer! Better than the touch of the sacraments! I wouldn't stop folk going to see a healer. I'd tell them to!'


He stopped talking because I raised my hand. I had seen movement on a hillside to the north, but it was only a deer. I dropped my hand and kicked the horse on.


'Now your Iseult,' Pyrlig went on, 'she's been raised with the power and she won't lose it.'


'Didn't the baptism wash it out of her?'


'Not at all! It just made her a bit colder and cleaner. Nothing wrong with a scrub once or twice a year.' He laughed. 'But she was frightened back there in the swamp. You were gone and all around were Saxons and they were spitting that she was a pagan, so what did you think she would do? She wants to be one of them, she wants folk to stop spitting at her, so she said she'd be baptised. And maybe she really is a Christian? I'd praise God for that mercy, but I'd rather praise him for making her happy.'


‘You don't think she is?'


'Of course she isn't! She's in love with you!' He laughed. 'And being in love with you means living among the Saxons, doesn't it? Poor girl. She's like a beautiful young hind that finds herself living among grunting pigs.'


'What a gift for words you have,' I said.


He laughed, delighted with his insult. 'Win your war, Lord Uhtred,' he said, 'then take her away from us priests and give her lots of children. She'll be happy, and one day she'll be truly wise. That's the women's real gift, to be wise, and not many men have it.'


And my gift was to be a warrior, though there was no fighting that day. We saw no Danes, though I was certain they had seen us and that by now Guthrum would have been told that Alfred had at last come from the swamp and was marching inland. We were giving him the opportunity to destroy us, to finish Wessex, and I knew that the Danes would be readying to march on us.


We spent that night in an earthen fort built by the old people, and next morning went north and east through a hungry land. I rode ahead, going into the hills to look for the enemy, but again the world seemed empty. Rooks flew, hares danced and cuckoos called from the woods that were thick with bluebells, but there were no Danes. I rode along a high ridge, gazing northwards, and saw nothing, and when the sun was at its height I turned east. There were ten of us in my band and our guide was a man from Wiltunscir who knew the country and he led us towards the valley of the Wilig where Egbert's Stone stands. A mile or so short of the valley we saw horsemen, but they were to the south of us and we galloped across un-grazed pastureland to find it was Alfred, escorted by Leofric, five soldiers and four priests.


'Have you been to the stone?' Alfred called out eagerly as we closed on him.


'No, lord.'


'Doubtless there are men there,' he said, disappointed that I could not bring him news.


'I didn't see any Danes either, lord.'


'It'll take them two days to organise,' he said dismissively. 'But they'll come! They'll come! And we shall beat them!' He twisted in his saddle to look at Father Beocca, who was one of the priests.


'Are you sore, father?'


'Mightily sore, lord.'


'You're no horseman, Beocca, no horseman, but it's not much farther. Not much farther, then you can rest!' Alfred was in a feverish mood. 'Rest before we fight, eh! Rest and pray, father, then pray and fight. Pray and fight!' He kicked his horse into a gallop and we pounded after him through a pink-blossomed orchard and up a slope, then across a long hilltop where the bones of dead cattle lay in the new grass. White mayflower edged the woods at the foot of the hill and a hawk slanted away from us, sliding across the valley towards the charred remains of a barn.


'It's just across the crest, lord!' my guide shouted at me.


'What is?'


'Defereal, lord!'


Defereal was the name of the settlement in the valley of the River Wilig where Egbert's Stone waited, and Alfred now spurred his horse so that his blue cloak flapped behind him. We were all galloping, spread across the hilltop, racing to be the first over the crest to see the Saxon forces, then Father Beocca's horse stumbled. He was, as Alfred said, a bad horseman, but that was no surprise for he was both lame and palsied, and when the horse tipped forward Beocca tumbled from the saddle. I saw him rolling in the grass and turned my horse back.


'I'm not hurt,' he shouted at me, 'not hurt! Not much. Go on, Uhtred, go on!'


I caught his horse. Beocca was on his feet now, limping as fast as he could to where Alfred and the other horsemen stood in a line gazing into the valley beyond.


'We should have brought the banners,' Beocca said as I gave him his reins.


'The banners?'


'So the fyrd knows their king has come,' he said breathlessly. 'They should see his banners on the skyline, Uhtred, and know he has come. The cross and the dragon, eh? In hoc signo! Alfred will be the new Constantine, Uhtred, a warrior of the cross! In hoc signo, God be praised, God be praised, God indeed be mightily praised.'


I had no idea what he meant, and nor did I care.


For I had reached the hilltop and could stare down into the long lovely valley of the Wilig.


Which was empty.


Not a man in sight. Just the river and the willows and the water meadows and the alders and a heron flying and the grass bending in the wind and the triple stone of Egbert on a slope above the Wilig where an army was supposed to gather. And there was not one man there. Not one single man in sight.

The valley was empty.


The men we had brought from Æthelingaeg straggled into the valley, and with them now was the fyrd of Sumorsaete. Together they numbered just over a thousand men, and about half were equipped to fight in the shield wall while the rest were only good for shoving the front ranks forward or for dealing with the enemy wounded or, more likely, dying.


I could not face Alfred's disappointment. He said nothing about it, but his thin face was pale and set hard as he busied himself deciding where the thousand men should camp, and where our few horses should be pastured. I rode up a high hill that lay to the north of the encampment, taking a score of men including Leofric, Steapa and Father Pyrlig. The hill was steep, though that had not stopped the old people from making one of their strange graves high on the slope. The grave was a long mound and Pyrlig made a wide detour rather than ride past it.


'Full of dragons, it is,' he explained to me.


'You've seen a dragon?' I asked.


'Would I be alive if I had? No one sees a dragon and lives!'


I turned in the saddle and stared at the mound. 'I thought folk were buried there?'


'They are! And their treasures! So the dragon guards the hoard. That's what dragons do. Bury gold and you hatch a dragon, see?'


The horses had a struggle to climb the steep slope, but at its summit We were rewarded by a stretch of firm turf that offered views far to the north. I had climbed the hill to watch for Danes. Alfred might believe that it would be two or three days before we saw them, but I expected their scouts to be close and it was possible that a war-band might try to harass the men camping by the Wilig.


Yet I saw no one. To the north-east were great downs, sheep hills, while straight ahead was the lower ground where the cloud shadows raced across fields and over blossoming mayflower and darkened the bright green new leaves.


'So what happens now?' Leofric asked me.


'You tell me.'


'A thousand men? We can't fight the Danes with a thousand men.'


I said nothing. Far off, on the northern horizon, there were dark clouds.


'We can't even stay here!' Leofric said, 'so where do we go?'


'Back to the swamp?' Father Pyrlig suggested.


'The Danes will bring more ships,' I said, 'and eventually they'll capture the swamp. If they send a hundred ships up the rivers then the swamp is theirs.'


'Go to Defnascir,' Steapa growled.


And the same thing would happen there, I thought. We would be safe for a time in Defnascir's tangle of hills and woods, but the Danes would come and there would be a succession of little fights and bit by bit Alfred would be bled to death. And once the Danes across the sea knew that Alfred was pinned into a corner of Wessex they would bring more ships to take the good land that he could not hold. And that, I thought, was why he had been right to try and end the war in one blow, because he dared not let Wessex's weakness become known.


Except we were weak. We were a thousand men. We were pathetic. We were dreams fallen to earth, and suddenly I began to laugh.


'What is it?' Leofric asked.


'I was thinking that Alfred insisted I learn to read,' I said, 'and for what?'


He smiled, remembering. It was one of Alfred's rules that every man who commanded sizeable bodies of troops must be able to read, though it was a rule he had ignored when he made Leofric commander of his bodyguard. It seemed funny at that moment. All that effort so I could read his orders and he had never sent me one. Not one.


'Reading is useful,' Pyrlig said.


'What for?'


He thought about it. The wind gusted, flapping his hair and beard. 'You can read all those good stories in the gospel-book,' he suggested brightly, 'and the saints' lives! How about those, eh? They're full of lovely things, they are. There was Saint Donwen! Beautiful woman she was, and she gave her lover a drink that turned him into ice.'


'Why did she do that?' Leofric asked.


'Didn't want to marry him, see?' Pyrlig said, trying to cheer us up, but no one wanted to hear more about the frigid Saint Donwen so he turned and stared northwards. 'That's where they'll come from, is it?' he asked.


'Probably,' I said, and then I saw them, or thought I did. There was a movement on the far hills, something stirring in the cloud shadow and I wished Iseult was on the hilltop for she had remarkable eyesight, but she would have needed a horse to climb to that summit and there were no horses to spare for women. The Danes had thousands of horses, all the beasts they had captured from Alfred at Cippanhamm, and all the animals they had stolen across Wessex, and now I was watching a group of horsemen on that far hill. Scouts, probably, and they would have seen us. Then they were gone. It had been a glimpse, no more, and so far away that I could not be sure of what I had seen.


'Or perhaps they won't come at all,' I went on, 'perhaps they'll march around us. Capture Wintanceaster and everywhere else.'


'The bastards will come,' Leofric said grimly, and I thought he was probably right. The Danes would know we were here, they would want to destroy us, and after that all would be easy for them.


Pyrlig turned his horse as if to ride back down to the valley, then paused. 'So it's hopeless, is it?' he asked.


'They'll outnumber us four or five to one,' 1 said.


'Then we must fight harder!'


I smiled. 'Every Dane who comes to Britain, father,' I explained, 'is a warrior. The farmers stay in Denmark, but the wild men come here. And us? We're nearly all farmers and it takes three or four farmers to beat down a warrior.'


'You're a warrior,' he said, 'all of you! You're warriors! You all know how to fight! You can inspire men, and lead men, and kill your enemies. And God is on your side. With God on your side, who can beat you, eh? You want a sign?'


'Give me a sign,' I said.


'Then look,' he said, and pointed down to the Wilig, and I turned my horse and there, in the afternoon sun, was the miracle we had wanted. Men were coming. Men in their hundreds. Men from the east and men from the south, men streaming down from the hills, men of the West Saxon fyrd, coming at their king's command to save their country.


'Now it's only two farmers to one warrior!' Pyrlig said cheerfully.


'Up to our arseholes,' Leofric said.


But we were not alone any longer. The fyrd was gathering.


PART THRE

R E


The Fyrd


Twel

e ve


Most men came in large groups, led by their thegns, while others arrived in small bands, but together they swelled into an army. Amulf, Ealdorman of Suth Seaxa, brought close to four hundred men and apologised that it could not be more, but there were Danish ships off his coast and he had been forced to leave some of his fyrd to guard the shore. The men of Wiltunscir had been summoned by Wulfhere to join Guthrum's army, but the reeve, a grim man named Osric, had scoured the southern part of the shire and over eight hundred men had ignored their Ealdorman's summons and came to Alfred instead. More arrived from the distant parts of Sumorsaete to join Wiglaf's fyrd that now numbered a thousand men, while half that many came from Hamptonscir, including Burgweard's garrison in which were Eadric and Cenwulf, crewmen from the Heahengel, and both embraced me, and with them was Father Willibald, eager and nervous. Almost every man came on foot, weary and hungry, with their boots falling apart, but they had swords and axes and spears and shields, and by mid afternoon there were close to three thousand men in the Wilig valley and more were still coming as I rode towards the distant hill where I thought I had seen the Danish scouts.


Alfred sent me and, at the last moment, Father Pyrlig had offered to accompany me and Alfred had looked surprised, appeared to think about it for a heartbeat, then nodded assent. 'Bring Uhtred home safe, father,' he had said stiffly.


I said nothing as we rode through the growing camp, but once we were on our own I gave Pyrlig a sour look. 'That was all arranged,' I said.


'What was?'


'You coming with me. He had your horse already saddled! So what does Alfred want?'


Pyrlig grinned. 'He wants me to talk you into becoming a Christian, of course. The king has great faith in my powers of speech.'


'I am a Christian,' I said.


'Are you now?'


'I was baptised, wasn't I? Twice, as it happens.'


'Twice! Doubly holy, eh? How come you got it twice?'


'Because my name was changed when I was a child and my stepmother thought heaven wouldn't recognise me under my old name.'


He laughed. 'So they washed the devil out of you the first time and slopped him back in the second?' I said nothing to that and Pyrlig rode in silence for a time. 'Alfred wants me to make you a good Christian,' he said after a while, 'because he wants God's blessing.'


'He thinks God will curse us because I'm fighting for him?'


Pyrlig shook his head. 'He knows, Uhtred, that the enemy are pagans. If they win then Christ is defeated. This isn't just a war over land, it's a war about God. And Alfred, poor man, is Christ's servant so he will do all he can for his master, and that means trying to turn you into a pious example of Christian humility. If he can get you onto your knees then it'll be easy to make the Danes grovel.'


I laughed, as he had meant me to. 'If it encourages Alfred,' I said, 'tell him I'm a good Christian.'


'I planned to tell him that anyway,' Pyrlig said, 'just to cheer him up, but in truth I wanted to come with you.'


‘Why?'


'Because I miss this life. God, I miss it! I loved being a warrior. All that irresponsibility! I relished it.

Kill and make widows, frighten children! I was good at it, and I miss it. And I was always good at scouting. We'd see you Saxons blundering away like swine and you never knew we were watching you.

Don't worry, I'm not going to talk Christ into you, whatever the king wants.'


Our job was to find the Danes, if they were near. Alfred had marched to the Wilig valley to block any advance Guthrum made into the heartland of Wessex, but he still feared that the Danes might resist the lure of destroying his small army and instead march around us to take southern Wessex, which would leave us stranded and surrounded by Danish garrisons. That uncertainty meant Alfred was desperate for news of the enemy, so Pyrlig and I rode north and east up the valley until we came to where a smaller river flowed south into the Wilig and we followed that lesser stream past a large village that had been reduced to ashes. The small river passed through good farmland, but there were no cattle, no sheep and the fields were unploughed and thick with weeds. We went slowly, for the horses were tired and we were well north of our army now. The sun was low in the west, though it was early May so the days were lengthening.

There were mayfly on the river and trout rising to them, and then a scuffling sound made us both pause, but it was only a pair of otter cubs scrabbling down to the water through the roots of a willow.

Doves were nesting in the blackthorn, and warblers called from the riverbank, and somewhere a woodpecker drummed intermittently. We rode in silence for a while, turning away from the river to go into an orchard where wrynecks sang among the pink blossom.

Pyrlig curbed his horse under the trees and pointed at a muddy patch in the grass and I saw hoof prints sifted with fallen petals. The prints were fresh and there were a lot of them.


'Bastards were here, weren't they?' he said, 'and not so long ago.'


I looked up the valley. There. was no one in sight. The hills rose steeply on either side with thick woods on their lower slopes. I had the sudden uncomfortable feeling that we were being watched, that we were blundering and the wolves were close.


'If I were a Dane,' Pyrlig spoke softly, and I suspected he shared my discomfort, 'I'd be over there,'

he jerked his head to the western trees.


'Why?'


'Because when you saw them, they saw us, and that's the way to where they saw us. Does that make sense?' He laughed wryly. I don't know, Uhtred, I just think the bastards are over there.'


So we went east. We rode slowly, as if we did not have a care in the world, but once we were in the woods we turned north. We both searched the ground for more hoof prints, but saw none, and the feeling of being watched had gone now, though we did wait for a long time to see if anyone was following us. There was only the wind in the trees. Yet I knew the Danes were near, just as a hall's hounds know when there are wolves in the nearby darkness. The hair on their necks stands up, they bare their teeth, they quiver.


We came to a place where the trees ended and we dismounted, tied the horses, and went to the wood's edge and just watched. And at last we saw them.


Thirty or forty Danes were on the valley's farther side, above the woods, and they had plainly ridden to the top of the hills, looked southwards, and were now coming back. They were scattered in a long line that was riding down into the woods. 'Scouting party,' Pyrlig said.


'They can't have seen much from that hilltop.'


'They saw us,' he said.


'I think so.'


'But they didn't attack us?' He was puzzled. 'Why not?’


'Look at me,' I said.


'I get a treat every day.'


'They thought I was a Dane,' I said. I was not in mail and had no helmet, so my long hair fell free down my leather-clad back and my arms were bright with rings. 'And they probably thought you were my performing bear,' I added.


He laughed. 'So shall we follow them?'


The only risk was crossing the valley, but if the enemy saw us they would probably still assume I was a fellow Dane, so we cantered over the open ground, then rode up into the further woods. We heard the Danes before we saw them. They were careless, talking and laughing, unaware that any Saxons were close. Pyrlig tucked his crucifix beneath his leather coat, then we waited until we were sure the last of the Danes had passed before kicking the horses uphill to find their tracks and so follow them. The shadows were lengthening, and that made me think that the Danish army must be close for the scouting party would want to reach safety before dark, but as the hilly country flattened we saw that they had no intention of joining Guthrum's forces that evening. The patrolling Danes had their own camp, and as we approached it we were nearly caught by another group of mounted scouts who rode in from the east. We heard the newcomers and swerved aside into a thicket and watched a dozen men ride by, and then we dismounted and crept through the trees to see how many enemy were in the camp.


There were perhaps a hundred and fifty Danes in a small pasture. The first fires were being lit, suggesting they planned to spend the night where they were.


'All scouting parties,' Pyrlig suggested.


'Confident bastards,' I said.


These men had been sent ahead to explore the hills, and they felt safe to camp in the open countryside, sure that no Saxon would attack them. And they were right. The West Saxon army was a long way south and we had no warband in the area, and so the Danes would have a quiet night and, in the morning, their scouts would ride again to watch Alfred's movements.


'But if they're here,' Pyrlig suggested, 'then it means Guthrum is following them.'


'Maybe,' I said. Or perhaps Guthrum was marching well to the east or west and had sent these men to make sure that Alfred was ignorant of his movements.


'We should go back,' Pyrlig said. 'Be dark soon.'


But I had heard voices and I held up a hand to silence him, and then went to my right, keeping to the places where the undergrowth was thickest, and heart what I thought I had heard. English.


'They've got Saxons here,' I said.


'Wulfhere's men?'


Which made sense. We were in Wiltunscir and Wulfhere's men would know this country, and who better to guide the Danes as they watched Alfred?


The Saxons were coming into the wood and we stayed behind some hawthorn bushes until we heard the sound of axes. They were cutting firewood. There seemed to be about a dozen of them. Most of the men who followed Wulfhere would probably be reluctant to fight Alfred, but some would have embraced their Ealdorman's new cause and doubtless those were the men who had been despatched to guide the Danish scouting parties. Wulfhere would only have sent men he could trust, fearing that less loyal men would desert to Alfred or just run away, so these Saxons were probably from the Ealdorman's household troops, the warriors who would profit most from being on the winner's side in the war between the Danes and the West Saxons.


'We should get hack to Alfred before it's dark,' Pyrlig whispered.


But just then a voice sounded close and petulant. 'I will go tomorrow,' the voice said.


'You won't, lord,' a man answered. There was the sound of splashing and I realised one of the two men had come to the bushes for a piss and the other had followed him. 'You'll go nowhere tomorrow,'

the second man went on, 'you'll stay here.'


'I just want to see them!' the petulant voice pleaded.


'You'll see them soon enough. But not tomorrow. You'll stay here with the guards.'


'You can't make me.'


'I can do what I like with you, lord. You might command here, but you take my orders all the same.'

The man's voice was hard and deep. 'And my orders are that you're staying here.'


'I'll go if I want,' the first voice insisted weakly and was ignored.


Very slowly, so that the blade made no noise against the scabbard's throat, I drew Serpent-Breath.

Pyrlig watched me, puzzled.


'Walk away,' I whispered to him, 'and make some noise.' He frowned in puzzlement at that, but I jerked my head and he trusted me.


He stood and walked towards our horses, whistling softly, and immediately the two men followed.

The one with the deep voice led. He was an old warrior, scar-faced and bulky. 'You!' he shouted, 'stop!'

And just then I stepped out from behind the hawthorn and swung Serpent-Breath once and her blade cut under his beard and into his throat, and cut so deep that I felt her scrape against his spine and the blood, sudden and bright in the spring dusk, sprayed across the leaf mould. The man went down like a felled ox. The second man, the petulant man, was following close behind and he was too astonished and much too scared to run away and so I seized his arm and pulled him down behind the bushes.


'You can't,' he began and I placed the flat of Serpent-Breath's bloody blade against his mouth so that he whimpered with terror.


'Not a sound,' I said to him, 'or you're dead.' Pyrlig came back then, sword drawn.


Pyrlig looked at the dead man whose breeches were still untied. He stooped to him and made the sign of the cross on his forehead. The man's death had been quick, and the capture of his companion had been quiet, and none of the woodcutters seemed to have taken alarm. Their axes went on thumping, the echoes rattling in the trees.


'We're taking this one back to Alfred,' I told Pyrlig, then I moved Serpent-Breath to my captive's throat. 'Make one sound,' I said, pressing the blade into his skin, 'and I'll gut you from your over-used gullet to your over-used crotch. Do you understand?'


He nodded.


'Because I'm doing you the favour I owe you,' I explained, and smiled nicely.


Because my captive was Æthelwold, Alfred's nephew and the would-be king of the West Saxons.


The man I had killed was named Osbergh and he had been the commander of Wulfhere's household troops. His job on the day of his death was to make certain, Æthelwold got into no trouble.


Æthelwold had a talent for misfortune. By rights he should have been the King of Wessex, though I daresay he would have been the last king for he was impetuous and foolish, and the twin solaces for having lost the throne to his uncle Alfred were ale and women. Yet he had ever wanted to be a warrior.

Alfred had denied him the chance, for he dared not let Æthelwold make a name for himself on the battlefield. Æthelwold, the true king, had to be kept foolish so that no man saw in him a rival for Alfred's throne. It would have been far easier to have killed Æthelwold, but Alfred was sentimental about family. Or perhaps it was his Christian conscience. But for whatever reason, Æthelwold had been allowed to live and had rewarded his uncle's mercy by constantly making a fool of himself.


But in these last months he had been released from Alfred's leash and his thwarted ambition had been given encouragement. He dressed in mail and carried swords. He was a startling looking man, handsome and tall, and he looked the part of the warrior, though he had no warrior's soul. He had pissed himself when I put Serpent-Breath to his throat, and now that he was my captive he showed no defiance. He was submissive, frightened and glad to be led.


He told us how he had pestered Wulfhere to be allowed to fight, and when Osbergh had brought a score of men to guide the Danes in the hills, he had been given notional charge of them. 'Wulfhere said I was in command,' Æthelwold said sullenly, 'but I still had to obey Osbergh.'


'Wulfhere was a damned fool to let you go so far from him,' I said.


'I think he was tired of me,' Æthelwold admitted.


'Tired of you? You were humping his women?'


'She's only a servant.' But I wanted to join the scouting parties, and Wulfhere said I could learn a lot from Osbergh.'


'You've just learned never to piss into a hawthorn bush,' I said, 'and that's worth knowing.'


Æthelwold was riding Pyrlig's horse and the Welsh priest was leading the beast by its reins. I had tied Æthelwold's hands. There was still a hint of light in the western sky, just enough to make our journey down the smaller river easy.


I explained to Pyrlig who Æthelwold was, and the priest grinned up at him. 'So you're a prince of Wessex, eh?'


'I should be king,' Æthelwold said sullenly.


'No you shouldn't,' I said.


'My father was! And Guthrum promised to crown me.'


'And if you believed him,' I said, 'you're a damned fool. You'd be king as long as he needed you, then you'd be dead.'


'Now Alfred will kill me,' he said miserably.


'He ought to,' I said, 'but I owe you a favour.'


'Do you think you can persuade him to let me live?' he asked eagerly.


'You'll do the persuading,' I said. 'You'll kneel to him, and you're going to say that you've been waiting for a chance to escape the Danes, and at last you succeeded, and you got away, found us, and have come to offer him your sword.'


Æthelwold just stared at me.


'I owe you a favour,' I explained, 'and so I'm giving you life. I'll untie your hands, you go to Alfred, and you say you're joining him because that's what you've wanted to do ever since Christmas. You understand that?'


Æthelwold frowned. 'But he hates me!'


'Of course he does,' I agreed, 'but if you kneel to him and swear you never broke your allegiance to him, then what can he do? He'll embrace you, reward you and be proud of you.'


'Truly?'


'So long as you tell him where the Danes are,' Pyrlig put in.


'I can do that,' Æthelwold said, 'they're coming south from Cippanhamm. They marched this morning.'


'How many?'


'Five thousand.'


'Coming here?'


'They're going to wherever Alfred is. They reckon they'll have a chance to destroy him, and after that it's just a summer of women and silver.' He said the last three words plaintively and I knew he had been relishing the prospect of plundering Wessex. 'So how many men does Alfred have?' he asked.


'Three thousand,' I said.


'Sweet Jesus,' he said fearfully.


'You always wanted to be a warrior,' I said, 'and what name can you make for yourself fighting a smaller army?'


'Jesus Christ!'


The last of the light went. There was no moon, but by keeping the river on our left we knew we could not get lost and after a while we saw the glow of firelight showing over the loom of the hills and knew we were seeing Alfred's encampment. I twisted in the saddle then and thought I saw another such glow far to the north. Guthrum's army.


'If you let me go,' Æthelwold asked sulkily, 'what's to stop me going back to Guthrum?'


'Absolutely nothing,' I said, ‘except the certainty that I'll hunt you down and kill you.'


He thought about that for a short while. 'You're sure my uncle will welcome me?'


Pyrlig answered for me. 'With open arms!' he said. 'It will be like the return of the prodigal son.

You'll be welcomed by slaughtered calves and psalms of rejoicing. Just tell Alfred what you told us, about Guthrum marching towards us.'


We reached the Wilig and the going was easy now for the light of the campfires was much brighter. I cut Æthelwold free at the edge of the encampment, then gave him back his swords. He carried two, as I did, a long one and a short sax.


'Well, my prince,' I said, 'time to grovel, eh?'


We found Alfred at the camp's centre. There was no pomp here. We did not have the animals to drag wagons loaded with tents or furniture, so Alfred was seated on a spread cloak between two fires.

He looked dispirited and later I learned that he had assembled the army in the twilight and made them a speech, but the speech, even Beocca admitted, had been less than successful. It was more a sermon than a speech,' Beocca told me glumly. Alfred had invoked God, spoken of Saint Augustine's doctrine of a righteous war and talked about Boethius and King David, and the words had flown over the heads of the tired, hungry troops. Now Alfred sat with the leading men of the army, all of them eating stale hard bread and smoked eel. Father Adelbert, the priest who had accompanied us to Cippanhamm, was playing a lament on a small harp. A bad choice of music, I thought, then Alfred saw me and waved Adelbert to silence. 'You have news?' he asked.


For answer I stood aside and bowed to Æthelwold, gesturing him towards the king. 'Lord,' I said to Alfred, 'I bring you your nephew.'


Alfred stood. He was taken aback, especially as Æthelwold was plainly no prisoner for he wore his swords. Æthelwold looked good, indeed he looked more like a king than Alfred. He was well made and handsome, while Alfred was much too thin and his face was so haggard that he looked much older than his twenty-nine years. And of the two it was Æthelwold who knew how to behave at that moment.

He unbuckled his swords and threw them with a great clatter at his uncle's feet, then he went to his knees and clasped his hands and looked up into the king's face.


'I have found you!' he said with what sounded like utter joy and conviction.


Alfred, bemused, did not know what to say so I stepped forward.


‘We discovered him, lord,' I said, 'in the hills. He was searching for you.'


'I escaped Guthrum,' Æthelwold said, 'God be praised, I escaped the pagan.' He pushed his swords to Alfred's feet. 'My blades are yours, lord king.'


This extravagant display of loyalty gave Alfred no choice except to raise his nephew and embrace him. The men around the fires applauded, then Æthelwold gave his news, which was useful enough.

Guthrum was on the march and Svein of the White Horse came with him. They knew where Alfred was and so they came, five thousand strong, to give him battle in the hills of Wiltunscir.


'When will they get here?' Alfred wanted to know.


'They should reach these hills tomorrow, lord,' Æthelwold said.


So Æthelwold was seated beside the king and given water to drink, which was hardly a fit welcome for a prodigal prince and caused him to throw me a wry glance, and it was then that I saw Harald, shire-reeve of Defnascir, among the king's companions.


'You're here?' I asked surprised.


'With five hundred men,' he said proudly.


We had expected no men from either Defnascir or Thornsaeta, but Harald, the shire-reeve, had brought four hundred of his own fyrd and a hundred more from Thornsaeta.


'There's enough men left to protect the coast against the pagan fleet,' he said, 'and Odda insisted we help defeat Guthrum.'


'How is Mildrith?'


'She prays for her son,' Harald said, 'and for all of us.'


There were prayers after the meal. There were always prayers when Alfred was around, and I tried to escape them, but Pyrlig made me stay.


'The king wants to talk with you,' he said.


So I waited while Bishop Alewold droned, and afterwards Alfred wanted to know whether Æthelwold had truly run away from the Danes.


'That's what he told me lord,' I said, 'and I can only say we found him.'


'He didn't run from us,' Pyrlig offered, 'and he could have done.'


'So there's good in the boy,' Alfred said.


'God be praised for that,' Pyrlig said.


Alfred paused, gazing down into the glowing embers of a campfire.


'I spoke to the army tonight,' he told us.


'I heard you did, lord,' I said.


He looked up at me sharply. 'What did you hear?'


'That you preached to them, lord.'


He flinched at that, then seemed to accept the criticism. 'What do they want to hear?' he asked.


'They want to hear,' Pyrlig answered, 'that you are ready to die for them.'


'Die?


‘They follow, kings lead,' Pyrlig said. Alfred waited. 'They don't care about Saint Augustine,' Pyrlig went on, 'they only care that their women and children are safe, that their lands are safe, and that they'll have a future of their own. They want to know that they'll win. They want to know the Danes are going to die. They want to hear that they'll be rich on plunder.'


'Greed, revenge and selfishness?' Alfred asked.


'If you had an army of angels, lord,' Pyrlig went on, 'then a rousing speech about God and Saint Augustine would doubtless fire their ardour, but you have to fight with mere men, and there's nothing quite like greed, revenge and selfishness to inspire mortals.'


Alfred frowned at that advice, but did not argue with it.


'So I can trust my nephew?' he asked me.


'I don't know that you can trust him,' I said, 'but nor can Guthrum. And Æthelwold did seek you out, lord, so be content with that.'


'I shall, I shall.' He bade us goodnight, going to his hard bed.


The fires in the valley were dying.


'Why didn't you tell Alfred the truth about Æthelwold?' I asked Pyrlig.


'I thought I would trust your judgement,' he answered.


'You're a good man.'


'And that constantly astonishes me.'


I went to find Iseult, then slept.


Next day the whole of the northern sky was dark with cloud, while over our army, and above the hills, was sunlight.


The West Saxon army, now almost three and a half thousand strong, marched up the Wilig, then followed the smaller river that Pyrlig and I had explored the previous evening. We could see the Danish scouts on the hills, and knew they would be sending messengers back to Guthrum.


I led fifty men to one of the hilltops. We were all mounted, all armed, all with shields and helmets, and we rode ready to fight, but the Danish scouts yielded the ground. There were only a dozen of them and they rode off the hill long before we reached the summit where a host of blue butterflies flickered above the springy turf. I gazed northwards at the ominous dark sky, and watched a sparrow hawk swoop. Down the bird went, and I followed its plunging fall and suddenly saw, beneath the folded wings and reaching claws, our enemy.


Guthrum's army was coming south.


The fear came then. The shield wall is a terrible place. It is where a warrior makes his reputation, and reputation is dear to us. Reputation is honour, but to gain that honour a man must stand in the shield wall where death runs rampant. I had been in the shield wall at Cynuit and I knew the smell of death, the stink of it, the uncertainty of survival, the horror of the axes and swords and spears, and I feared it. And it was coming.


I could see it coming, for in the lowlands north of the hills, in the green ground stretching long and level towards distant Cippanhamm, was an army. The Great Army, the Danes called it, the pagan warriors of Guthrum and Svein, the wild horde of wild men from beyond the sea.


They were a dark smear on the landscape. They were coming through the fields, band after band of horsemen, spread across the country, and because their leading men were only ,just emerging into the sunlight it seemed as if their horde sprang from the shadowlands. Spears and helmets and mail and metal reflected the light, a myriad glints of broken sunlight that spread and multiplied as yet more men came from beneath the clouds. They were nearly all mounted.


'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' Leofric said.


Steapa said nothing. He just glowered at them.


Osric, the shire-reeve of Wiltunscir, made the sign of the cross.


'Someone has to tell Alfred,' he said.


'I'll go,' Father Pyrlig offered.


'Tell him the pagans have crossed the Afen,' Osric said. 'Tell him they're heading towards,' he paused, trying to judge where the horde was going, 'Ethandun,' he finally said.


'Ethandun,' Pyrlig repeated the name.


'And remind him there's a fort of the old people there,' Osric said. This was his shire, his country, and he knew its hills and fields, and he sounded grim, doubtless wondering what would happen if the Danes found the old fortress and occupied it. 'God help us,' Osric said. 'They'll be in the hills tomorrow morning, tell him.’


'Tomorrow morning, at Ethandun,' Pyrlig said, then turned his horse and spurred away.


'Where's the fort?' I asked.


Osric pointed. 'You can see it.' From this distance the ancient fastness looked like nothing more than green wrinkles on a far hilltop. All across Wessex there were such forts with their massive earthen walls, and this one was built at the top of the escarpment that climbed from the lowlands, a place guarding the sudden edge of the chalk downs. 'Some of the bastards will get up there tonight,' Osric said, 'but most won't make it till morning. Let's just hope they ignore the fort.'


We had all thought that Alfred would find a place where Guthrum must attack him, a slope made for defence, a place where our smaller numbers would be helped by the difficult ground, but the sight of that distant fort was a reminder that Guthrum might adopt the same tactics. He might find a place where it would be hard for us to attack him, and Alfred would have a grim choice then. To attack would be to court disaster, while to retreat would guarantee it. Our food would be exhausted in a day or two, and if we tried to withdraw south through the hills, Guthrum would release a horde of horsemen against us. And even if the army of Wessex escaped unscathed it would be a beaten army. If Alfred brought the fyrd together, then marched it away from the enemy, men would take it for a defeat and begin to slip away to protect their homes. We had to fight, because to decline battle was a defeat.


The army camped that evening to the north of the woods where I had found Æthelwold. He was in the king's entourage now, and went with Alfred and his war-leaders to the hilltop to watch the Danish army as it closed on the hills. Alfred looked a long time.


'How far away are they?' he asked.


'From here?' Osric answered. 'Four miles. From your army? Six.'


'Tomorrow, then,' Alfred said, making the sign of the cross. The northern clouds were spreading, darkening the evening, but the slanting light reflected from spears and axes at the old people's fort. It seemed Guthrum had not ignored the place after all.


We went back down to the encampment to find yet more men arriving. Not many now, just small bands, but still they came, and one such band, travel-weary and dusty, was mounted on horses and all sixteen men had chain mail and good helmets.


They were Mercians and they had ridden far to the east, crossed the Thames, then looped through Wessex, ever avoiding Danes, and so come to help Alfred. Their leader was a short young man, wide in the chest, round-faced, and with a pugnacious expression.


He knelt to Alfred, then grinned at me, and I recognised my cousin, Ethelred.


My mother was a Mercian, though I never knew her, and her brother Ethelred was a power in the southern part of that country and I had spent a short time in his hall when I first fled from Northumbria. Back then I had quarrelled with my cousin, called Ethelred like his father, but he seemed to have forgotten our youthful enmity and embraced me instead. The top of his head just came up to my collar-bone.


'We've come to fight,' he told me, his voice muffled by my chest.


'You'll have a fight,' I promised him.


'Lord,' he let go of me and turned back to Alfred, 'my father would have sent more men, but he must protect his land.'


'He must,' Alfred said.


'But he sent the best he has,' Ethelred went on. He was young and bumptious, a little strut of a youth, but his confidence pleased Alfred, as did the gleaming silver crucifix hanging over Ethelred's chain mail. 'Allow me to present Tatwine,' my cousin went on, 'the chief of my father's household troops.'


I remembered Tatwine, a barrel of a man and a real fighter, whose arms were smothered in blotchy black marks, each made with a needle and ink and representing a man killed in battle, He gave me a crooked smile. 'Still alive, lord?'


'Still alive, Tatwine.'


'Be good to fight alongside you again.'


Good to have you here,' I said, and it was. Few men are natural-born warriors, and a man like Tatwine was worth a dozen others.


Alfred had ordered the army to assemble again. He did it partly so the men could see their own numbers and take heart from that, and he did it, too, because he knew his speech the previous night had left men confused and uninspired. He would try again.


'I wish he wouldn't,' Leofric grumbled. 'He can make sermons, but he can't make speeches.'


We gathered at the foot of a small hill. The light was fading. Alfred had planted his two banners, the dragon and the cross, on the summit of the hill, but there was a small wind so the flags stirred rather than flew. He climbed to stand between them. He was alone, dressed in a mail coat over which he wore the faded blue cloak. A group of priests began to follow him, but he waved them back to the hill's foot, then be just stared at us huddled in the meadow beneath him and for a time he said nothing and I sensed the discomfort in the ranks. They wanted fire put into their souls and expected holy water instead.


'Tomorrow!' he said suddenly. His voice was high, but it carried clearly enough. 'Tomorrow we fight!

Tomorrow! The Feast of St John the Apostle!'


'Oh God,' Leofric grumbled next to me, 'up to our arsholes in more saints.'


'John the Apostle was condemned to death!' Alfred said, 'he was condemned to be boiled in oil! Yet he survived the ordeal! He was plunged into the boiling oil and he lived! He came from the cauldron a stronger man! And we shall do the same.' He paused, watching us, and no one responded, we all just gazed at him, and he must have known that his homily on Saint John was not working for he made an abrupt gesture with his right hand as if he were sweeping all the saints aside. 'And tomorrow,' he went on, 'is also a day for warriors. A day to kill your enemies. A day to make the pagans wish they had never heard of Wessex!'


He paused again, and this time there were some murmurs of agreement.


'This is our land! We fight for our homes! For our wives! For our children! We fight for Wessex!'


'We do,' someone shouted.


'And not just Wessex!' Alfred's voice was stronger now. 'We have men from Mercia, men from Northumbria, men from East Anglia!' I knew of none from East Anglia and only Beocca and I were from Northumbria, but no one seemed to care.


'We are the men of England,' Alfred shouted, 'and we fight for all Saxons.'


Silence again. The men liked what they heard, but the idea of England was in Alfred's head, not theirs. He had a dream of one country, but it was too big a dream for the army in the meadow.


'And why are the Danes here?' Alfred asked. 'They want your wives for their pleasure, your children for their slaves and your homes for their own, but they do not know us!' He said the last six words slowly, spacing them out, shouting each one distinctly. They do not know our swords,' he went on,

'they do not know our axes, our spears, our fierceness! Tomorrow we teach them! Tomorrow we kill them! Tomorrow we hack them into pieces! Tomorrow we make the ground red with their blood and make them whimper! Tomorrow we shall make them call for our mercy!'


'None!' a man called out.


‘No mercy!' Alfred shouted, and I knew he did not mean it. He would have offered every mercy to the Danes, he would have offered them the love of God and tried to reason with them, but in the last few minutes he had at last learned how to talk to warriors.


'Tomorrow,' he shouted, 'you do not fight for me! I fight for you! I fight for Wessex! I fight for your wives, for your children and your homes! Tomorrow we fight and, I swear to you on my father's grave and on my children's lives, tomorrow we shall win!'


And that started the cheering. It was not, in all honesty, a great battle speech, but it was the best Alfred ever gave and it worked. Men stamped the ground and those who carried their shields heat them with swords or spears so that the twilight was filled with a rhythmic thumping as men shouted, 'No mercy!' The sound echoed back from the hills. 'No mercy, no mercy.'


We were ready. And the Danes were ready.


That night it clouded over. The stars vanished one by one, and the thin moon was swallowed in the darkness. Sleep came hard.


I sat with Iseult who was cleaning my mail while I sharpened both swords.


'You will win tomorrow,' Iseult said in a small voice.


'You dreamed that?'


She shook her head. 'The dreams don't come since I was baptised.'


'So you made it up?'


'I have to believe it,' she said.


The stone scraped down the blades. All around me other men were sharpening weapons.


'When this is over,' I said, 'you and I will go away. We shall make a house.'


'When this is over,' she said, 'you will go north. Ever north. Back to your home.'


'Then you'll come with me.'


'Perhaps.' She heaved the mail coat to start on a new patch, scrubbing it with a scrap of fleece to make the links shine. 'I can't see my own future. It's all dark.'


'You shall be the lady of Bebbanburg,' I said, 'and I shall dress you in furs and crown you with bright silver.'


She smiled, but I saw there were tears on her face. I took it for fear. There was plenty of that in the camp that night, especially when men noticed the glow of light showing where the Danes had lit their fires in the nearby hills. We did sleep, but I was woken long before dawn by a small rain. No one slept through it, but all stirred and pulled on war gear.


We marched in the grey light. The rain came and went, spiteful and sharp, but always at our backs.

Most of us walked, using our few horses to carry shields. Osric and his men went first, for they knew the shire. Alfred had said that the men of Wiltunscir would be on the right of the battle line, and with them would be the men of Suth Seaxa. Alfred was next, leading his bodyguard that was made of all the men who had come to him in Æthelingaeg, and with him was Harald and the men of Defnascir and Thornsaeta. Burgweard and the men from Hamptonscir would also fight with Alfred, as would my cousin Ethelred from Mercia, while on the left would be the strong fyrd of Sumorsaete under Wiglaf.

Three and a half thousand men. The women came with us. Some carried their men's weapons, others had their own.


No one spoke much. It was cold that morning, and the rain made the grass slippery. Men were hungry and tired. We were all fearful.


Alfred had told me to collect fifty or so men to lead, but Leofric was unwilling to lose that many from his ranks, so I took them from Burgweard instead. I took the men who had fought with me in the Heahengel when she had been the Fyrdraca, and twenty-six of those men had come from Hamtun.

Steapa was with us, for he had taken a perverse liking to me, and I had Father Pyrlig, who was dressed as a warrior, not a priest. We were fewer than thirty men, but as we climbed past a green-mounded grave of the old folk, Æthelwold came to us. 'Alfred said I could fight with you,' he said.


'He said that?'


'He said I'm not to leave your side.'


I smiled at that. If I wanted a man by my side it would be Eadric or Cenwulf, Steapa or Pyrlig, men I could trust to keep their shields firm. 'You're not to leave my back,' I said to Æthelwold.


'Your back?'


'And in the shield wall you stay close behind me. Ready to take my place.'


He took that as an insult, 'I want to be in the front,' he insisted.


'Have you ever fought in a shield wall?'


'You know I haven't.'


'Then you don't want to be in the front,' I said, 'and besides, if Alfred dies, who'll be king?'


'Ah.' He half smiled. 'So I stay behind you?'


'You stay behind me.'


Iseult and Hild were leading my horse. 'If we lose,' I told them, 'you both get in the saddle and ride.'


'Ride where?'


'Just ride. Take the money,' I said. My silver and treasures, all I possessed, were in the horse's saddlebags, 'take it and ride with Hild.'


Hild smiled at that. She looked pale and her fair hair was plastered tight to her scalp by the rain.

She had no hat, and was dressed in a white shift belted with rope. I was surprised that she had come with the army, thinking she would have preferred to find a convent, but she had insisted on coming.


'I want to see them dead,' she told me flatly. 'And the one called Erik I want to kill myself.' She patted the long, narrow-bladed knife hanging from her belt.


'Erik is the one who ...' I began, then hesitated.


'The one who whored me,' she said.


'So he wasn't the one we killed that night?'


She shook her head. 'That was the steersman of Erik's ship. But I'll find Erik, and I won't go back to a convent till I see him screaming in his own blood.'


'Full of hate, she is,' Father Pyrlig told me as we followed Hild and Iseult up the hill.


'Isn't that bad in a Christian?'


Pyrlig laughed. 'Being alive is bad in a Christian. We say a person is a saint if they're good, but how few of us become saints? We're all bad! Some of us just try to be good.'


I glanced at Hild. 'She's wasted as a nun,' I said.


'You do like them thin, don't you?' Pyrlig said, amused. 'Now I like them meaty as well-fed heifers!

Give me a nice dark Briton with hips like a pair of ale barrels and I'm a happy priest. Poor Hild. Thin as a ray of sunlight, she is, but I pity a Dane who crosses her path today.'


Osric's scouts came back to Alfred. They had ridden ahead and seen the Danes. The enemy was waiting, they reported, at the edge of the escarpment, where the hills were highest and where the old people's fort stood. Their banners, the scouts said, were numberless. They had also seen Danish scouts, so Guthrum and Svein must have known we were coming.


On we went, ever higher, climbing into the chalk downs, and the rain stopped, but no sun appeared for the whole sky was a turmoil of grey and black. The wind gusted from the west. We passed whole rows of graves from the ancient days and I wondered if they contained warriors who had gone to battle as we did, and I wondered if in the thousands of years to come other men would toil up these hills with swords and shields. Of warfare there is no end, and I looked into the dark sky for a sign from Thor or Odin, hoping to see a raven fly, but there were no birds. Just clouds.


And then I saw Osric's men slanting away to the right. We were in a fold of the hills and they were going around the right-hand hill and, as we reached the saddle between the two low slopes, I saw the level ground and there, ahead of me, was the enemy.


I love the Danes. There are no better men to fight with, drink with, laugh with or live with. Yet that day, as on so many others of my life, they were the enemy and they waited for me in a gigantic shield wall arrayed across the down. There were thousands of Danes, Spear-Danes and Sword-Danes, Danes who had come to make this land theirs, and we had come to keep it ours.


'God give us strength,' Father Pyrlig said when he saw the enemy who had begun shouting as we appeared. They clashed spears and swords against limewood shields, making a thunder on the hilltop.

The ancient fort was the right wing of their army, and men were thick on the green turf walls. Many of those men had black shields and above them was a black banner, so that was where Guthrum was, while their left wing, which faced our right, was strung out on the open down and it was there I could see a triangular banner, supported by a small cross-staff, showing a white horse. So Svein commanded their left, while to the Danish right, our left, the escarpment dropped to the river plains. It was a steep drop, a tumbling hill. We could not hope to outflank the Danes on that side, for no one could fight on such a slope. We had to attack straight ahead, directly into the shield wall and against the earthen ramparts and onto the spears and the swords and the war axes of our outnumbering enemy.


I looked for Ragnar's eagle-wing banner and thought I saw it in the fort, but it was hard to be certain, for every crew of Danes flew their standard, and the small flags were crowded together and the rain had started to fall again, obscuring the symbols, but off to my right, outside the fort and close to the bigger standard of the white horse, was a Saxon flag. It was a green flag with an eagle and a cross, which meant Wulfhere was there with that part of the Wiltunscir fyrd which had followed him. There were other Saxon banners in the enemy horde. Not many, maybe a score, and I guessed that the Danes had brought men from Mercia to fight for them. All the Saxon banners were in the open ground, none was inside the fort.


We were still a long way apart, much farther than a man could shoot an arrow, and none of us could hear what the Danes were shouting. Osric's men were making our right wing as Wiglaf led his Sumorsaete fyrd off to the left. We were making a line to oppose their line, but ours would inevitably be shorter. The odds were not quite two Danes to one Saxon, but it was close.


'God help us,' Pyrlig said, touching his crucifix.


Alfred summoned his commanders, gathering them under the rain-sodden banner of the dragon.

The Danish thunder went on, the clattering of thousands of weapons against shields, as the king asked his army's leaders for advice.


Amulf of Suth Seaxa, a wiry man with a short beard and a perpetual scowl, advised attack. 'Just attack,' he said, waving at the fort. 'We'll lose some men on the walls, but we'll lose men anyway.'


'We'll lose a lot of men,' my cousin, Ethelred warned. He only led a small band, but his status as the son of a Mercian ealdorman meant he had to be included in Alfred's council of war.


'We do better defending,' Osric growled. 'Give a man land to defend and he stands, so let the bastards come to us.' Harald nodded agreement.


Alfred cast a courteous eye on Wiglaf of Sumorsaete who looked surprised to be consulted. 'We shall do our duty, lord,' he said, 'do our duty whatever you decide.'


Leofric and I were present, but the king did not invite our opinion so we kept silent.


Alfred gazed at the enemy, then turned back to us.


'In my experience,' he said, 'the enemy expect something of us.' He spoke pedantically, in the same tone he used when he was discussing theology with his priests. 'They want us to do certain things.

What are those things?'


Wiglaf shrugged, while Amulf and Osric looked bemused. They had both expected something fiercer from Alfred. Battle, for most of us, was a hammering rage, nothing clever, a killing orgy, but Alfred saw it as a competition of wisdom, or perhaps as a game of tall that took cleverness to win. That, I am sure, was how he saw our two armies, as tall pieces on their chequered board.


'Well?' he asked.


'They expect us to attack!' Osric said uncertainly.


'They expect us to attack Wulfhere,' I said.


Alfred rewarded me with a smile. 'Why Wulfhere?'


'Because he's a traitor and a bastard and a piece of whore-begotten goat-shit,' I said.


'Because we do not believe,' Alfred corrected me, 'that Wulfhere's men will fight with the same passion as the Danes. And we're right, they won't. His men will pull hack from killing fellow Saxons.'


'But Svein is there,' I said.


'Which tells us?' he asked.


The others stared at him. He knew the answer, but he could never resist being a teacher, and so he waited for a response.


'It tells us,' I supplied it again, 'that they want us to attack their left, but they don't want their left to break. That's why Svein is there. He'll hold us and they'll launch an assault out of the fort to hit the flank of our attack. That breaks the right of our army and then the whole damned lot come and kill the rest of us.'


Alfred did not respond, but looked worried, suggesting that he agreed with me. The other men turned and looked at the Danes, as if some magical answer might suggest itself, but none did.


'So do as Lord Amulf suggests,' Harald said, 'attack the fort.'


'The walls are steep,' Wiglaf warned. The Ealdorman of Sumorsaete was a man of sunny disposition, frequent laughter and casual generosity, but now, with his men arrayed opposite the fort's green ramparts, he was downcast.


'Guthrum would dearly like us to assail the fort,' the king observed.


This caused some confusion for it seemed, according to Alfred, that the Danes wanted us to attack their right just as much as they wanted us to attack their left. The Danes, meanwhile, were jeering at us for not attacking at all. One or two ran towards our lines and screamed insults, and their whole shield wall was still banging weapons in a steady, threatening rhythm. The rain made the colours of the shields darker. The colours were black and red and blue and brown and dirty yellow.


'So what do we do?' Ethelred asked plaintively.


There was silence and I realised that Alfred, though he understood the problem, had no answer to it. Guthrum wanted us to attack and probably did not care whether we went against Svein’s seasoned warriors on the left of the enemy line or against the steep, slippery ditches in front of the fort's walls.

And Guthrum must also have known that we dared not retreat because his men would pursue and break us like a horde of wolves savaging a frightened flock.


'Attack their left,' I said.


Alfred nodded as though he had already come to that conclusion.


'And?' he invited me.


'Attack it with every man we've got,' I said. There were probably two thousand men outside the fort and at least half of those were Saxons. I thought we should assault them in one violent rush, and overwhelm them by numbers. Then the weakness of the Danish position would be revealed, for they were on the very lip of the escarpment and once they were forced over the edge they had nowhere to go but down the long, precipitous slope. We could have destroyed those two thousand men, then reformed our lines for the harder task of attacking the three thousand inside the fort.


'Employ all our men?' Alfred asked. 'But then Guthrum will attack our flank with every man he has.'


'Guthrum won't,' I said. 'He'll send some men to attack our flank, but he'll keep most of his troops inside the fort. He's cautious. He won't abandon the fort, and he won't risk much to save Svein. They don't like each other.'


Alfred thought about it, but I could see he did not like the gamble. He feared that while we attacked Svein the other Danes would charge from the fort and overwhelm our left. I still think he should have taken my advice, but fate is inexorable and he decided to imitate Guthrum by being cautious.


'We will attack on our right,' he said, 'and drive off Wulfhere's men, but we must be ready for their counter-stroke and so our left stays where it is.'


So it was decided. Osric and Arnulf, with the men of Wiltunscir and Suth Seaxa, would give battle to Svein and Wulfhere on the open land to the east of the fort, but we suspected that some Danes would come from behind the ramparts to attack Osric's flank and so Alfred would take his own bodyguard to be a bulwark against that assault. Wigulf, meanwhile, would stay where he was, which meant a third of our men were doing nothing. 'If we can defeat them,' Alfred said, 'then their remnant will retreat into the fort and we can besiege it. They have no water there, do they?’


'None,' Osric confirmed.


'So they're trapped,' Alfred said as though the whole problem was neatly resolved and the battle as good as won. He turned to Bishop Alewold. 'A prayer, bishop, if you would be so kind.'


Alewold prayed, the rain fell, the Danes went on jeering, and I knew the awful moment, the clash of the shield walls, was close. I touched Thor's hammer, then Serpent-Breath's hilt, for death was stalking us. God help me, I thought, touching the hammer again, Thor help us all, for I did not think we could win.


Thir

i t

r ee

e n


The Danes made their battle thunder and we prayed. Alewold harangued God for a long time, mostly begging him to send angels with flaming swords, and those angels would have been useful, though none appeared. It would be tip to us to do the job.


We readied for battle. I took my shield and helmet from the horse that Iseult led, but first I teased out a thick hank of her black hair. ‘Trust me,' I said to her, because she was nervous, and I used a small knife to cut the tress. I tied one end of the hair to Serpent-Breath's hilt and made a loop with the other end, Iseult watched. 'Why?' she asked.


'I can put the loop over my wrist,' I showed her, 'then I can't lose the sword. And your hair will bring me luck.'


Bishop Alewold was angrily demanding that the women go back. Iseult stood on tiptoe to buckle my wolf-crested helmet in place, then she pulled my head down and kissed me through the gap in the faceplate. 'I shall pray for you,' she said.


'So will I,' Hild said.


'Pray to Odin and Thor,' I urged then, then watched as they led the horse away. The women would hold the horses a quarter mile behind our shield wall and Alfred insisted they went that far back so that no man was tempted to make a sudden dash for a horse and gallop away.


It was time to make the shield wall, and that is a cumbersome business. Some men offer to be in the front rank, but most try to be behind, and Osric and his battle-leaders were shoving and shouting as they tried to settle the men. 'God is with us!' Alfred was shouting at them. He was still mounted and rode down Osric's slowly-forming shield wall to encourage the fyrd. 'God is with us!' he shouted again,

'we cannot lose! God is with us!' The rain fell harder. Priests were walking down the lines offering blessings and adding to the rain by throwing handfuls of holy water at the shields. Osric's fyrd was mostly five ranks thick, and behind them was a scatter of men with spears. Their job, as the two sides met, was to hurl the spears over their comrades' heads, and the Danes would have similar spear-throwers readying their own weapons.


'God is with us!' Alfred shouted, 'He is on our side! Heaven watches over us! The holy saints pray for us! The angels guard us! God is with us!' His voice was already hoarse. Men touched amulets for luck, closed their eyes in silent prayer and tugged at buckles. In the front rank they obsessively touched their shields against their neighbour's shields. The right-hand edge of every man's shield was supposed to overlap the next shield so that the Danes were confronted with a solid wall of iron-reinforced limewood. The Danes would make the same wall, but they were still jeering at us, daring us to attack. A young man stumbled from the back of Osric's fyrd and vomited. Two dogs ran to eat the vomit. A spear-thrower was on his knees, shaking and praying.


Father Beocca stood beside Alfred's standards with his hands raised in prayer. I was in front of the standards with Steapa to my right and Pyrlig to my left. 'Bring fire on them, oh most holy Lord!' Beocca wailed, 'bring fire on them and strike them down! Punish them for their iniquities.' His eyes were tight closed and his face raised to the rain so that he did not see Alfred gallop hack to us and push through our ranks. The king would stay mounted so he could see what happened, and Leofric and a dozen other men were also on horseback so that their shields could protect Alfred from thrown spears and axes.


'Forward!' Alfred shouted.


'Forward!' Leofric repeated the order because the king's voice was so hoarse.


No one moved. It was up to Osric and his men to begin the advance, but men are ever reluctant to go against an enemy shield wall. It helps to be drunk. I have been in battles where both sides struggled in a reeking daze of birch wine and ale, but we had little of either and our courage had to be summoned out of sober hearts and there was not much to be found on that cold wet morning.


'Forward!' Leofric shouted again, and this time Osric and his commanders took up the shout and the men of Wiltunscir shuffled a few paces forward and the Danish shields clattered into the wall and locked together and the sight of that skjaldborg checked the advance. That is what the Danes call their shield wall, the skjaldborg or shield fort. The Danes roared mockery, and two of their younger warriors strutted out of their line to taunt us and invite a duel.


'Stay in the wall!' Leofric roared.


'Ignore them!' Osric shouted.


Horsemen rode from the fort, perhaps a hundred of them, and they trotted behind the skjaldborg that was formed of Svein's warriors and Wulfhere's Saxons. Svein joined the horsemen. I could see his white horse, the white cloak and the white horsetail plume. The presence of the horsemen told me that Svein expected our line to break and he wanted to ride our fugitives down just as his riders had slaughtered Peredur's broken Britons at Dreyndynas. The Danes were full of confidence, and so they should have been for they outnumbered us and they were all warriors, while our ranks were filled with men more used to the plough than the sword.


'Forward!' Osric shouted. His line quivered, but did not advance more than a yard.


Rain dripped from the rim of my helmet. It ran down inside the face-plate, worked itself inside my mail coat and ran in shivers down my chest and belly.


'Strike them hard, lord!' Beocca shouted, 'slaughter them without mercy! Break them in pieces!'


Pyrlig was praying, at least I think he was praying for he was speaking in his own tongue, but I heard the word duw repeated over and over and I knew, from Iseult, that duw was the Britons' word for god. Æthelwold was behind Pyrlig. He was supposed to be behind me, but Eadric had insisted on being at my back, so Æthelwold would protect Pyrlig instead. He was chattering incessantly, trying to cover his nervousness, and I turned on him.


'Keep your shield up,' I told him.


'I know, I know.'


'You protect Pyrlig's head, understand?'


'I know!' He was irritated that I had given him the advice. 'I know,' he repeated petulantly.


'Forward! Forward!' Osric called. Like Alfred he was on horseback and he went up and down behind his line, sword drawn, and I thought he would jab the blade at his men to goad them onwards. They went a few paces and the Danish shields came up again and the limewood made a knocking sound as the skjaldborg was made and once again our line faltered. Svein and his horsemen were now at the very far flank, but Osric had placed a group of picked warriors there, ready to guard the open end of his line.


'For God! For Wiltunscir!' Osric shouted, 'forward!'


Alfred's men were on the left of Osric's fyrd where we were bent slightly back, ready to receive the expected flank attack from the fort. We went forward readily enough, but then, we were mostly warriors and knew we could not advance in front of Osric's more nervous troops. I almost stepped into a scrap of the ground where, astonishingly, three leverets lay low and quivering. I stared at them and hoped that the men behind me would avoid the little beasts and knew they would not. I do not know why hares leave their young in the open, but they do and there they lay, small, sleek leverets in a hollow of the downs, doubtless the first things to die in that day of wind and rain.


'Shout at them!' Osric called. 'Tell them they're bastards! Call them sons of whores! Say they're shit from the north! Shout at them!' He knew that was one way to get men moving. The Danes were screaming at us, calling us women, saying we had no courage, and no one in our ranks was shouting back, but Osric's men started now and the wet sky was filled with the noise of weapons banging on shields and men calling insults.


I had hung Serpent-Breath on my back. In the crush of battle a sword is easier to draw over the shoulder than from the hip, and the first stroke can then be a vicious downward hack. I carried Wasp-Sting in my right hand. Wasp-Sting was a sax, a short-sword, a stout blade for stabbing, and in the press of men heaving against an enemy shield wall a short-sword can do more damage than a long blade. My shield, iron-rimmed, was held on my left forearm by two leather loops. The shield had a metal boss the size of a man's head, a weapon in itself. Steapa, to my right, had a long sword, not as long as the one with which he had fought me at. Cippanhamm, but still a hefty blade, though in his big hand it looked almost puny. Pyrlig carried a boar spear, short and stout and with a wide blade. He was saying the same phrase over and over. 'Ein tad, yr hwn wytyn y nefoedd, sancteiddier dy enw.' I learned later it was the prayer Jesus had taught his disciples. Steapa was muttering that the Danes were bastards. 'Bastards,' he said, then, 'God help me, bastards.' He kept saying it. Over and over.

'Bastards, God help me, bastards.' My mouth was suddenly too dry to speak, and my stomach felt sour and my bowels loose.


'Forward! Forward!' Osric called and we shuffled on, shields touching, and we could see the enemies' faces now. We could see men's unkempt beards and yellow-toothed snarls, see their scarred cheeks, pocked skin and broken noses. My face-plate meant I could only see directly ahead. Sometimes it is better to fight without a face-plate, to see the attacks coming from the side, but in the clash of shield walls a face-plate is useful. The helmet was lined with leather. I was sweating. Arrows flicked from the Danish line. They did not have many bowmen and the arrows were scattered, but we raised shields to protect our faces. None came near me, but we were bent back from the line to watch the fort's green walls that were rimmed with men, thick with sword-Danes, and I could see Ragnar's eagle-wing banner there and I wondered what would happen if I found myself face to face with him. I could see the axes and spears and swords, the blades that sought our souls. Rain drummed on helmets and shields.


The line paused again. Osric's shield wall and Svein's skjaldborg were only twenty paces apart now and men could see their immediate foes, could see the face of the man they must kill or the man who would kill them. Both sides were screaming, spitting anger and insults, and the spear-throwers had their first missiles hefted.


'Keep closer' someone shouted.


'Shields touching!'


'God is with us!' Beocca called.


'Forward!' Another two paces, more of a shuffle forward than stepping.


'Bastards,' Steapa said, 'God help me, bastards.'


'Now!' Osric screamed. 'Now! Forward and kill them! Forward and kill them! Go! Go! Go!' And the men of Wiltunscir went. They let out a great war shout, as much to hearten themselves as to frighten the enemy, and suddenly, after so long, the shield wall went forward fast, men screaming, and the spears came over the Danish line and our own spears were hurled back and then came the clash, the real battle thunder as shield wall met skjaldborg. The shock of the collision shook our whole line so that even my troops, who were not yet engaged, staggered. I heard the first screams, the clangour of blades, the thump of metal driving into shieldwood, the grunting of men, and then I saw the Danes coming over the green ramparts, a flood of Danes charging us, intent on hacking into the flank of our attack, but that was why Alfred had put us on the left of Osric's force.


'Shields!' Leofric roared.


I hoisted my shield, touched Steapa's and Pyrlig's shields, then crouched to receive the charge.

Head down, body covered by wood, legs braced, Wasp-Sting ready. Behind us and to our right Osric's men fought. I could smell blood and shit. Those are the smells of battle, then I forgot Osric's fight for the rain was in my face, and the Danes were coming at a run, no shield wall formed, just a frenzied charge intent on winning the battle in one furious assault. There were hundreds of them, and then our spear-throwers let their missiles go.


'Now!' I shouted, and we stepped one pace forward to meet the charge and my left arm was crushed into my chest as a Dane hit me, shield against shield, and be slammed an axe down and I rammed Wasp-Sting forward, past his shield, into his flank and his axe buried itself in Eadric's shield that was above my head. I twisted Wasp-Sting's blade, pulled her free and stabbed again. I could smell ale on the Dane's sour breath. His face was a grimace. He yanked his axe free. I stabbed again and twisted the sax's tip into mail or bone, I could not tell which. 'Your mother was a piece of pig-shit,' I told the Dane, and he screamed in rage and tried to bring the axe down onto my helmet, but I ducked and shoved forward, and Eadric protected me with his shield, and Wasp-Sting was red now, warm and sticky with blood, and I ripped her upwards.


Steapa was screaming incoherently, his sword slashing left and right, and the Danes avoided him.

My enemy stumbled, went down onto his knees, and I hit him with the shield boss, breaking his nose and teeth, then shoved Wasp-Sting into his bloody mouth. Another man immediately took his place, but Pyrlig buried his boar spear in the newcomer's belly.


'Shields!' I shouted, and Steapa and Pyrlig instinctively lined their shields with mine. I had no idea what happened elsewhere on the hilltop. I only knew what happened within Wasp-Sting's reach.


'Back one! Back one!' Pyrlig called, and we stepped back one pace so that the next Danes, taking the place of the men we had wounded or killed, would trip over the fallen bodies of their comrades, and then we stepped forward as they came so that we met them when they were off balance. That was how to do it, the way of the warrior, and we in Alfred's immediate force were his best soldiers. The Danes had charged us wildly, not bothering to lock shields in the belief that their fury alone would overwhelm us. They had been drawn, too, by the sight of Alfred's banners and the knowledge that should those twin flags topple then the battle was as good as won, but their assault hit our shield wall like an ocean wave striking a cliff, and it shattered there. It left men on the turf and blood on the grass, and now the Danes at last made a proper shield wall and came at us more steadily.


I heard the enemy shields touching, saw the Danes' wild eyes over the round rims, saw their grimaces as they gathered their strength. Then they shouted and came to kill us.


'Now!' I shouted and we thrust forward to meet them.


The shield walls crashed together. Eadric was at my back, pressing me forward, and the art of fighting now was to keep a space between my body and my shield with a strong left arm, and then to stab under the shield with Wasp-Sting. Eadric could fight over my shoulder with his sword. I had space to my right for Steapa was left-handed which meant his shield was on his right arm, and he kept moving it away from me to give his long sword room to strike.


That gap, no wider than a man's foot is long, was an invitation to the Danes, but they were scared of Steapa and none tried to burst through the small space. His height alone made him distinctive, and his skull-tight face made him fearsome. He was bellowing like a calf being gelded, half shriek and half belligerence, inviting the Danes to come and be killed. They refused. They had learned the danger of Pyrlig, Steapa and I, and they were cautious. Elsewhere along Alfred's shield wall there were men dying and screaming, swords and axes clanging like bells, but in front of me the Danes hung back and merely jabbed with spears to keep us at bay. I shouted that they were cowards, but that did not goad them onto Wasp-Sting, and I glanced left and right and saw that all along Alfred's line we were holding them. Our shield wall was strong. All that practice in Æthelingaeg was proving itself, and for the Danes the fight grew ever more difficult for they were attacking us, and to reach us they had to step over the bodies of their own dead and wounded. A man does not see where he treads in battle for he is watching the enemy, and some Danes stumbled, and others slipped on the rain-slicked grass and when they were off balance we struck hard, spears and swords like snake-tongues, making more bodies to trip the enemy.


We of Alfred's household troops were good. We were steady. We were beating the Danes, but behind us, in Osric's larger force, Wessex was dying.


Because Osric's shield wall unravelled.


Wulfhere's men did it. They did not break Osric's shield wall by fighting it, but by trying to join it.

Few of them wanted to fight for the Danes and, now that the battle was joined, they shouted at their countrymen that they were no enemy and wanted to change sides, and the shield wall opened to let them through, and Svein's men went for the gaps like wildcats. One after the other those gaps widened as Sword-Danes burst through. They cut Wulfhere's men down from behind, they prised open Osric's ranks and spread death like a plague. Svein's Vikings were warriors among farmers, hawks among pigeons, and all of Alfred's right wing shattered. Arnulf saved the men of Suth Seaxa by leading them to the rear of our ranks, and they were safe enough there, but Osric's fyrd was broken, harried and driven away east and south.


The rain had stopped and a cold damp wind scoured the edge of the downs now. Alfred's men, reinforced by Arnulf's four hundred and a dozen or so of Osric's fugitives, stood alone as the Wiltunscir fyrd retreated. They were being driven away from us, and Svein and his horsemen were panicking them. The fyrd had been eight hundred strong, ranked firm, and now they were shattered into small groups that huddled together for protection and tried to fend off the galloping horsemen who thrust with their long spears. Bodies lay all across the turf. Some of Osric's men were wounded and crawled south as if there might be safety where the women and horses were gathered around a mounded grave of the old folk, but the horsemen turned and speared them, and the un-mounted Danes were making new shield walls to attack the fugitives. We could do nothing to help, for we were still fighting Guthrum's men who had come from the fort and, though we were winning that fight, we could not turn our backs on the enemy. So we thrust and hacked and pushed, and slowly they went backwards, and then they realised that they were dying man by man, and I heard the Danish shouts to go back to the fort, and we let them go. They retreated from us, walking backwards, and when they saw we would not follow, they turned and ran to the green walls. They left a tide line of corpses, sixty or seventy Danes on the turf, and we had lost no more than twenty men. I took a silver chain off one corpse, two arm rings from another and a fine bonehandled knife with a knob of amber in its hilt from a third.


'Back!' Alfred called.


It was not till we retreated to where we had begun the fight that I realised the disaster on our right.

We had been the centre of Alfred's army, but now we were its right wing, and what had been our strong right flank was splintered chaos. Many of Osric's men had retreated to where the women and horses waited, and they made a shield wall there which served to protect them, but most of the fyrd had fled farther east and was being carved into smaller and smaller groups.


Svein at last hauled his men back from the pursuit, but by then nearly all our right wing was gone.

Many of those men lived, but they had been driven from the field and would be reluctant to come back and take more punishment. Osric himself had survived, and he brought the two hundred men who had retreated to the women and horses back to Alfred, but that was all he had left. Svein formed his men again, facing us, and I could see him haranguing them.


'They're coming for us,' I said.


'God will protect us,' Pyrlig said. He had blood on his face. A sword or axe had pierced his helmet and cut open his scalp so that blood was crusted thick on his left cheek.


'Where was your shield?' I demanded of Æthelwold.


'I've got it,' he said. He looked pale and frightened.


'You're supposed to protect Pyrlig's head,' I snarled at him.


'It's nothing,' Pyrlig tried to calm my anger.


Æthelwold looked as if he would protest, then suddenly jerked forward and vomited. I turned away from him. I was angry, but I was also disappointed. The bowel-loosening fear was gone, but the fighting had seemed half-hearted and ineffective. We had seen off the Danes who had attacked us, but we had not hurt them so badly that they would abandon the fight. I wanted to feel the battle-rage, the screaming joy of killing, and instead all seemed ponderous and difficult.


I had looked for Ragnar during the fight, fearing having to fight my friend, and when the Danes had gone back to the fort I saw he had been engaged further down the line. I could see him now, on the rampart, staring at us, then I looked right, expecting to see Svein lead his men in an assault on us, but instead I saw Svein galloping to the fort and I suspected he went to demand reinforcements from Guthrum.


The battle was less than an hour old, yet now it paused. Some women brought us water and mouldy bread while the wounded sought what help they could find. I wrapped a rag around Eadric's left arm where an axe blade had gone through the leather of his sleeve.


'It was aimed at you, lord,' he said, grinning at me toothlessly.


I tied the rag into place. 'Does it hurt?'


'Bit of an ache,' he said, 'but not bad. Not bad.' He flexed his arm, found it worked and picked up his shield.


I looked again at Svein's men, but they seemed in no hurry to resume their attack. I saw a man tip a skin of water or ale to his mouth. Just ahead of us, among the line of dead, a man suddenly sat up.

He was Danish and had plaited black hair that had been tied in knots and decorated with ribbons. I had thought he was dead, but he sat up and stared at us with a look of indignation and then, seemingly, yawned. He was looking straight at me, his mouth open, and then a flood of blood rimmed and spilled over his lower lip to soak his beard. His eyes rolled white and he fell backwards.

Svein's men were still not moving. There were some eight hundred of them arrayed in their line.

They were still the left wing of Guthrum's army, but that wing was much smaller now that it had been shorn of Wulfhere's men, and so I turned and pushed through our ranks to find Alfred.


'Lord!' I called, getting his attention. 'Attack those men!' I pointed to Svein's troops. They were a good two hundred paces from the fort and, for the moment at least, without their leader because Svein was still inside the ramparts. Alfred looked down on me from his saddle and I urged him to attack with every man in the centre division of our army. The Danes had the escarpment at their back and I reckoned we could tip them down that treacherous slope.


Alfred listened to me, looked at Svein's men, then shook his head dumbly. Beocca was on his knees, hands spread wide and face screwed tight in an intensity of prayer.


'We can drive them off, lord,' I insisted.


'They'll come from the fort,' Alfred said, meaning that Guthrum's Danes would come to help Svein's men. Some would, but I doubted enough would come.


'But we want them out of the fort,' I insisted. 'They're easier to kill in open ground, lord.'


Alfred just shook his head again. I think, at that moment, he was almost paralysed by the fear of doing the wrong thing, and so he chose to do nothing. He wore a plain helmet with a nasal, no other protection for his face, and he looked sickly pale. He could not see an obvious opportunity, and so he would let the enemy make the next decision.


It was Svein who made it. He brought more Danes out of the fort, three or four hundred of them.

Most of Guthrum's men stayed behind the ramparts, but those men who had made the first attack on Alfred's bodyguard now streamed onto the open downland where they joined Svein's troops and made their shield wall. I could see Ragnar's banner among them.


'They're going to attack, aren't they?' Pyrlig said. The rain had washed much of the blood from his face, but the split in his helmet looked gory. 'I'm all right,' he said, seeing me glance at the damage, 'I've had worse from a row with the wife. But those bastards are coming, aren't they? They want to keep killing us from our right.'


'We can beat them, lord,' I called back to Alfred. 'Put all our men against them. All of then!'


He seemed not to hear.


'Bring Wiglaf's fyrd across, lord!' I appealed to him.


'We can't move Wiglaf,' he said indignantly.


He feared that if he moved the Sumorsaete fyrd from its place in front of the fort then Guthrum would lead all his men out to assault our left flank, but I knew Guthrum was far too cautious to do any such thing. He felt safe behind the turf ramparts and he wanted to stay safe while Svein won the battle for him. Guthrum would not move until our army was broken, then he would launch an assault. But Alfred would not listen. He was a clever man, perhaps as clever as any man born, but he did not understand battle. He did not understand that battle is not just about numbers, it is not about moving tall pieces, and it is not even about who has the advantage in ground, but about passion and madness and a screaming, ungovernable rage.


And so far I had felt none of those things. We in Alfred's household troops had fought well enough, but we had merely defended ourselves. We had not carried slaughter to the enemy, and it is only when you attack that you win. Now, it seemed, we were to defend ourselves again, and Alfred stirred himself to order me and my men to the right of his line.


'Leave the standards with me,' he said, 'and make sure our flank is safe.'


There was honour in that. The right end of the line was where the enemy might try to wrap around us and Alfred needed good men to hold that open flank, and so we formed a tight knot there. Far off across the down I could see the remnants of Osric's fyrd. They were watching us. Some of them, I thought, would return if they thought we were winning, but for the moment they were too full of fear to rejoin Alfred's army.


Svein rode his white horse up and down the face of his shield wall. He was shouting at his troops, encouraging them. Telling them we were weaklings who needed only one push to topple.


'And I looked,' Pyrlig said to me, 'and I saw a pale horse, and the rider's name was death.' I stared at him in astonishment. 'It's from the gospel book,' he explained sheepishly, 'and it just came to my mind.'


'Then put it out of your mind,' I said harshly, 'because our job is to kill him, not fear him.' I turned to tell Æthelwold to make certain he kept his shield up, but saw he had taken a new place in the rear rank. He was better there, I decided, so left him alone.


Svein was shouting that we were lambs waiting to be slaughtered, and his men had begun beating weapons against their shields. There were just over a thousand men in Svein's ranks now, and they would be assaulting Alfred's division that numbered about the same, but the Danes, still had the advantage, for every man in their shield wall was a warrior, while over half our men were from the fyrds of Defnascir, Thomsaeta and Hamptonscir. If we had brought Wiglaf's fyrd to join us we could have overwhelmed Svein, but by the same token he could have swamped us if Guthrum had the courage to leave the fort. Both sides were being cautious. Neither was willing to throw everything into the battle for fear of losing everything.


Svein's horsemen were on the left flank, opposite my men. He wanted us to feel threatened by the riders, but a horse will not charge into a shield wall. It will sheer away, and I would rather face horsemen than foot-soldiers. One horse was tossing its head and I could see blood on its neck. Another horse was lying dead out where the corpses lay in the cold wind that was bringing the first ravens from the north. Black wings in a dull sky. Odin's birds.


'Come and die!' Steapa suddenly shouted. 'Come and die, you bastards! Come on!'


His shout prompted others along our line to call insults to the Danes. Svein turned, apparently surprised by our sudden defiance. His men had started forward, but stopped again, and I realised, with surprise, that they were just as fearful as we were. I had always held the Danes in awe, reckoning them the greatest fighting men under the sky. Alfred, in a moment of gloom, once told me it took four Saxons to beat one Dane, and there was a truth in that, but it was not a binding truth, and it was not true that day for there was no passion in Svein's men. There was unhappiness there, a reluctance to advance, and I reckoned that Guthrum and Svein had quarrelled. Or perhaps the cold, damp wind had quelled everyone's ardour.


'We're going to win this battle!' I shouted, and surprised myself by shouting it.


Men looked at me, wondering if I had been sent a vision by my gods.


'We're going to win!' I was hardly aware of speaking. I had not meant to make a speech, but I made one anyway. 'They're frightened of us!' I called out, 'they're scared! Most of them are skulking in the fort because they daren't come out to face Saxon blades! And those men,' I gestured at Svein's ranks with Wasp-Sting, 'know they're going to die. They're going to die.' I took a few paces forward and spread my arms to get the Danes' attention. I held my shield out to the left and Wasp-Sting to the right. 'You're going to die' I shouted it in Danish, loud as I could, then in English. 'You're going to die!'


And all Alfred's men took up that shout. 'You're going to die! You're going to die!'


Something odd happened then. Beocca and Pyrlig claimed that the spirit of God wafted through our army, and maybe that did happen, or else we suddenly began to believe in ourselves. We believed we could win and as the chant was shouted at the enemy we began to go forward, step by step, beating swords against shields and shouting that the enemy would die. I was ahead of my men, taunting the enemy, screaming at them, dancing as I went, and Alfred called me back to the ranks. Later, when all was done, Beocca told me that Alfred called me repeatedly, but I was capering and shouting, out ahead on the grass where the corpses lay, and I did not hear him. And Alfred's men were following me and he did not call them back though he had not ordered them forward.


'You bastards!' I screamed, 'you goat-turds! You fight like girls!' I do not know what insults I shouted that day, only that I shouted them and that I went ahead, on my own, asking just one of them to come and fight me man to man.

Alfred never approved of those duels between the shield walls. Perhaps, sensibly, he disapproved because he knew he could not have fought one himself, but he also saw them as dangerous. When a man invites an enemy champion to a fight, man on man, he invites his own death, and if he dies he takes the heart from his own side and gives courage to the enemy, and so Alfred ever forbade us to accept Danish challenges, but on that cold wet day one man did accept my challenge.

It was Svein himself. Svein of the White Horse, and he turned the white horse and spurred towards me with his sword in his right hand. I could hear the hooves thumping, see the clods of wet turf flying behind, see the stallion's mane tossing and I could see Svein's boar-masked helmet above the rim of his shield. Man and horse coming for me, and the Danes were jeering and just then Pyrlig shouted at me.

'Uhtred! Uhtred!'

I did not turn to look at him. I was too busy sheathing Wasp-Sting and was about to pull Serpent-Breath from her scabbard, but just then Pyrlig's thick-shafted boar spear skidded beside me in the wet grass, and I understood what he was trying to tell me.

I left Serpent-Breath on my shoulder and snatched up the Briton's spear just as Svein closed on me. All I could hear was the thunder of hooves, see the white cloak spreading, the bright shine of the lofted blade, the tossing horsehair plume, white eyes on the horse, teeth bared, and then Svein twitched the stallion to his left and cut the sword at me. His eyes were glittering behind the eyepieces of his helmet as he leaned to kill me, but as his sword came I threw myself into his horse and rammed the spear into the beast's guts. I had to do it one-handed, for I had my shield on my left arm, but the wide blade pierced hide and muscle, and I was screaming, trying to drive it deeper, and then Svein's sword struck my lifted shield like a hammer blow and his right knee struck my helmet so that I was thrown hard back to sprawl on the grass. I had let go of the spear, but it was well buried in the horse's belly and the animal was screaming and shaking, bucking and tossing, and thick blood was pouring down the spear's shaft that banged and bounced along the grass.

The horse bolted. Svein somehow stayed in the saddle. There was blood on the beast's belly. I had not hurt Svein, I had not touched him, but he was fleeing from me, or rather his white horse was bolting in pain and it ran straight at Svein's own shield wall. A horse will instinctively swerve away from a shield wall, but this horse was blinded by pain, and then, just short of the Danish shields, it half fell. It slid on the wet grass and skidded hard into the skjaldborg, breaking it open. Men scattered from the animal. Svein tumbled from the saddle, and then the horse somehow managed to get hack on its feet, and it reared and screamed. Blood was flying from its belly, and its hooves were flailing at the Danes, and now we were charging them at the run. I was on my feet, Serpent-Breath in my right hand, and the horse was thrashing and twisting, and the Danes backed away from it, and that opened their shield wall as we hit them.


Svein was just getting to his feet as Alfred's men arrived. I did not see it, but men said Steapa's sword took Svein's head off in one blow. A blow so hard that the helmeted head flew into the air, and perhaps that was true, but what was certain was that the passion was on us now. The blinding, seething passion of battle. The blood lust, the killing rage, and the horse was doing the work for us, breaking the Danish shield wall apart so all we had to do was ram into the gaps and kill.


And so we killed. Alfred had not meant this to happen. He had expected to wait for the Danish attack and hoped we would resist it, but instead we had thrown off his leash and were doing his work, and he had the wit to send Arnulf's men out to the right because my men were among the enemy. The horsemen had tried to come around our rear, but the men of Suth Seaxa saw them off with shields and swords, then guarded the open flank as all Alfred's men from Æthelingaeg, and all Harald's men from Defnascir and Thornsaeta joined the slaughter. My cousin was there, with his Mercians, and he was a stout fighter. I watched him parry, stab, put down a man, take on another, kill him, and go on steadily.

We were making the hilltop rich with Danish blood because we had the fury and they did not, and the men who had fled the field, Osric's men, were coming back to join the fight.


The horsemen went. I did not see them go, though their tale will be told. I was fighting, screaming, shouting at Danes to come and be killed, and Pyrlig was beside me, holding a sword now, and the whole left-hand side of Svein's shield wall had broken and its survivors were making small groups, and we attacked them. I charged one group with the shield, using its boss to slam a man back and stabbing with Serpent-Breath, feeling her break through mail and leather, and Leofric appeared from somewhere, axe swinging, and Pyrlig was ramming his sword's tip into a man's face, and for every Dane there were two Saxons and the enemy stood no chance. One man shouted for mercy and Leofric broke his helmet apart with the axe so that blood and brains oozed onto the jagged metal and I kicked the man aside and plunged Serpent-Breath into a man's groin so that he screamed like a woman in childbirth. The poets often sing of that battle, and for once they get something right when they tell of the sword joy, the blade song, the slaughter. We tore Svein's men to bloody ruin, and we did it with passion, skill and savagery. The battle-calm was on me at last and I could do no wrong. Serpent-Breath had her own life and she stole it from the Danes who tried to oppose me, but those Danes were broken and running and all the left wing of Svein's vaunted troops was defeated.


And there was suddenly no enemy near me except for the dead and injured. Alfred's nephew, Æthelwold, was jabbing his sword at one of the wounded Danes,


'Either kill him,' I snarled, 'or let him live.' The man had a broken leg and had an eye hanging down his bloody cheek and he was no danger to anyone.


'I have to kill one pagan,' Æthelwold said. He prodded the man with the sword tip and I kicked his blade aside, and would have helped the wounded man except it was then that I saw Haesten.


He was at the hill's edge, a fugitive, and I shouted his name. He turned and saw me, or saw a blood-drenched warrior in mail and a wolf-crested helmet, and he stared at me, then perhaps he recognised the helmet for he fled.


'Coward!' I shouted at him. 'You treacherous, bastard coward! You swore me an oath! I made you rich! I saved your rotten life!'


He turned then, half grinned at me and waved his left arm on which hung the splintered remnants of a shield, then he ran to what remained of the right-hand side of Svein's shield wall, and that was still in good order, its shields locked tight. There were five or six hundred men there, and they had swung back, then retreated towards the fort, but now they checked because Alfred's men, having no one left to kill, were turning on them. Haesten joined the Danish ranks, pushing through the shields, and I saw the eagle-wing banner above them and knew that Ragnar, my friend, was leading those survivors.


I paused. Leofric was shouting at men to form a shield wall and I knew this attack had lost its fury, but we had damaged them. We had killed Svein and a good number of his men, and the Danes were now penned back against the fort. I went to the hill's edge, following a trail of blood on the wet grass, and saw that the white horse had bolted over the down's lip and now lay, its legs grotesquely cocked in the air and its white pelt spattered with blood, a few yards down the slope.


'That was a good horse,' Pyrlig said. He had joined me on the edge of the hill. I had thought this crest was the top of the escarpment, but the land was tangled here, as though a giant had kicked the hillside with a massive boot. The ground fell away to make a steep valley that suddenly climbed to a farther crest that was the real edge of the downs, and the steep valley sloped up to the fort's eastern corner, and I wondered whether it would offer a way into the fastness.


Pyrlig was still staring at the dead horse. 'You know what we say at home?' he asked me. 'We say that a good horse is worth two good women, that a good woman is worth two good hounds, and that a good hound is worth two good horses.'


'You say what?'


'Never mind,' he touched my shoulder. 'For a Saxon, Uhtred, you fight well. Like a Briton.'


I decided the valley offered no advantage over a direct assault and turned away to see that Ragnar was retreating step by step towards the fort. I knew this was the moment to attack him, to keep the battle-anger alive and the slaughter fresh, but our men were plundering the dead and the dying and none had the energy to renew the assault, and that meant we would have the harder task of killing Danes protected by a rampart. I thought of my father, killed in an attack on a wall. He had not shown much liking for me, probably because 1 had been a small child when he died, and now I would have to follow him into the death-trap of a well protected wall. Fate is inexorable.


Svein's banner of the white horse had been captured and a man was waving it towards the Danes.

Another had Svein's helmet on the tip of a spear, and at first I thought it was Svein's head, then I saw it was only the helmet. The white horsetail plume was pink now. Father Willibald was holding his hands to heaven, saying a prayer of thanks, and that was premature, I thought, for all we had done was break Svein's men and Guthrum's troops still waited for us behind their walls. And Ragnar was there too, safe in the fort. Its walls made a semi-circle jutting into the downs, ending at the escarpment's lip. They were high walls, protected by a ditch.


'It'll be a bastard crossing those ramparts,' I said.


'Maybe we won't have to,' Pyrlig answered.


'Of course we have to.'


'Not if Alfred can talk them out of there,' Pyrlig said, and he pointed and I saw that the king, accompanied by two priests and by Osric and Harald, was approaching the fort. 'He's going to let them surrender,' Pyrlig said.


I could not believe this was the time to talk. This was the killing time, not a place for negotiations.

'They won't surrender,' I said, 'of course they won't! They still think they can beat us.'


'Alfred will try to persuade them,' Pyrlig said.


'No,' I shook my head. 'He'll offer them a truce.' I spoke angrily. 'He'll offer to take hostages. He'll preach to them. It's what he always does.'


I thought about going to join him, if for nothing else to add some sourness to his reasonable suggestions, but I could not summon the effort. Three Danes had gone to talk to him, but I knew they would not accept his offer. They were not beaten, far from it. They still had more men than we did and they had the walls of the fort, and the battle was still theirs to win.


Then I heard the shouts. Shouts of anger and screams of pain, and I turned and saw that the Danish horsemen had reached our women, and the women were screaming and there was nothing we could do.


The Danish horsemen had expected to slaughter the broken remnants of Alfred's shield wall, but instead it had been Svein's men who had been broken and the riders, out on Svein's left flank, had retreated into the downs. They must have thought to circle about our army and rejoin Guthrum from the west, and on the way they had seen our women and horses and smelled easy plunder.


Yet our women had weapons, and there were a few wounded men there, and together they had resisted the horsemen. There was a brief flurry of killing, then the Danish riders, with nothing to show for their attack, rode away westwards. It had taken a few moments, nothing more, but Hild had snatched up a spear and run at a horseman, screaming hate for the horrors the Danes had inflicted on her in Cippanhamm, and Eanflaed, who saw it all, said that Hild sank the spear in a Dane's leg and the man had chopped down with his sword, and Iseult, who had gone to help Hild, had parried the blow with another sword, and a second Dane caught her from behind with an axe, and then a rush of screaming women drove the Danes away. Hild lived, but Iseult's skull had been broken open and her head almost split into two. She was dead.


'She has gone to God,' Pyrlig told me when Leofric brought us the news. I was weeping, but I did not know whether it was sorrow or anger that consumed me, I could say nothing. Pyrlig held my shoulders. 'She is with God, Uhtred.'


'Then the men who sent her there must go to hell,' I said. 'Any hell. Freeze or burn, the bastards!'


I pulled away from Pyrlig and strode towards Alfred. I saw Wulfhere then. He was a prisoner, guarded by two of Alfred's bodyguard, and he brightened when he saw me as though he thought I was a friend, but I just spat at him and walked on past. Alfred frowned when I joined him. He was escorted by Osric and Harald, and by Father Beocca and Bishop Alewold, none of whom spoke Danish, but one of the Danes was an English-speaker. There were three of them, all strangers to me, but Beocca told me their spokesman was called Hrothgar Ericson and I knew he wasone of Guthrum's chieftains.


'They attacked the women,' I told Alfred. The king just stared at me, perhaps not understanding what I had said. 'They attacked the women!' I repeated.


'He's whimpering,' the Danish interpreter spoke to his two companions, 'that the women were attacked.'


'If I whimper,' I turned on the man in fury, 'then you will scream.' I spoke in Danish. 'I shall pull your guts out of your arsehole, wrap them around your filthy neck and feed your eyeballs to my hounds. Now if you want to translate, you shrivelled bastard, translate properly, or else go back to your vomit.'


The man blinked, but said nothing. Hrothgar, resplendent in mail and Silvered helmet, half smiled.

'Tell your king,' he said, 'that we might agree to withdraw to Cippanhamm, but we shall want hostages.'


I turned on Alfred: 'How many men does Guthrum still have?' He was still unhappy that I had joined him, but he took the question seriously. 'Enough,' he said.


'Enough to hold Cippanhamm and a half-dozen other towns. We break them now.'


'You are welcome to try,' Hrothgar said when my words were translated.


I turned back to him. 'I killed Ubba,' I said, 'and I put Svein down, and next I shall cut Guthrum's throat and send him to his whore-mother. We'll try.'


'Uhtred.' Alfred did not know what I had said, but he had heard my tone and he tried to calm me.


'There's work to be done, lord,' I said. It was anger speaking in me, a fury at the Danes and an equal fury at Alfred, who was once again offering the enemy terms. He had done it so often. He would beat them in battle and immediately make a truce because he believed they would become Christians and live in brotherly peace. That was his desire, to live in a Christian Britain devoted to piety, but on that day I was right. Guthrum was not beaten, he still outnumbered us, and he had to be destroyed.


'Tell them,' Alfred said, 'that they can surrender to us now. Tell them they can lay down their weapons and come out of the fort.' Hrothgar treated that proposal with the scorn it deserved. Most of Guthrum's men had yet to fight. They were far from defeated, and the green walls were high and the ditches were deep, and it was the sight of those ramparts that had prompted Alfred to speak with the enemy. He knew men must die, many men, and that was the price he had been unwilling to pay a year before when Guthrum had been trapped in Exanceaster, but it was a price that had to be paid. It was the price of Wessex.


Hrothgar had nothing more to say, so turned away. 'Tell Earl Ragnar,' I called after him, 'that I am still his brother.'


'He will doubtless see you in Valhalla one day,' Hrothgar called back, then waved a negligent hand to me. I suspected that the Danes had never intended to negotiate a truce, let alone a surrender, but when Alfred offered to talk they had accepted because it gave them time to organise their defences.


Alfred scowled at me. He was plainly annoyed that I had intervened, but before he could say anything Beocca spoke. 'What happened to the women?' he asked.


'They fought the bastards off,' I said, 'but Iseult died.'


'Iseult,' Alfred said, and then he saw the tears in my eyes and did not know what to say. He flinched, stuttered incoherently, then closed his eyes as if in prayer. 'I am glad,' he said after he had collected his thoughts, 'that she died a Christian.'


'Amen,' Beocca said.


'I would rather she was a live pagan,' I snarled, and then we went back to our army and Alfred again summoned his commanders. There was really no choice. We had to assault the fort. Alfred talked for a time about establishing a siege, but that was not practical. We would have to sustain an army on the summit of the downs and, though Osric insisted the enemy had no springs inside the fort, neither did we have springs close by. Both armies would be thirsty, and we did not have enough men to stop Danes going down the steep embankment at night to fetch water. And if the siege lasted longer than a week, then men of the fyrd would begin to slip home to look after their fields, and Alfred would be tempted to mercy, especially if Guthrum promised to convert to Christianity.


So we urged an assault on Alfred. There could be nothing clever. Shield walls must be made and men sent against the ramparts, and Alfred knew that every man in the army must join the attack.

Wiglaf and the men of Sumorsaete would attack on the left, Alfred's men in the centre, while Osric, whose fyrd had gathered again and was now reinforced by the men who had deserted from Guthrum's army, would assault on the right.


'You know how to do it,' Alfred said, though without any enthusiasm for he knew he was ordering us into a feast of death, 'put your best men in the centre, let them lead, and make the others press behind and on either side.'


No one said anything. Alfred offered a bitter smile. 'God has smiled on us so far,' he said, 'and he will not desert us.'


Yet he had deserted Iseult. Poor, fragile Iseult, shadow queen and lost soul, and I pushed into the front rank because the only thing I could do for her now was to take revenge.


Steapa, as smothered in blood as I was, pushed into the rank beside me. Leofric was to my left and Pyrlig was now behind me. 'Spears and long swords,' Pyrlig advised us, 'not those short things.'


'Why not?' Leofric asked.


'You climb that steep wall,' he said, 'and all you can do is go for their ankles. Bring them down. I've done it before. You need a long reach and a good shield.'


'Jesus help us,' Leofric said. We were all fearful, for there is little in warfare as daunting as an assault on a fortress. If I had been in my senses I would have been reluctant to make that attack, but I was filled with a keening sorrow for Iseult and nothing except revenge filled my mind.


'Let's go,' I said, 'let's go.'


But we could not go. Men were collecting spears thrown in the earlier fighting, and the bowmen were being brought forward. Whenever we attacked we wanted a shower of spears to precede us, and a plague of stinging arrows to annoy the enemy, but it took time to array the spearmen and archers behind the men who would make the assault.


Then, ominously for our archers, it began to rain again. Their bows would still work, but water weakened the strings. The sky became darker as a great belly of black cloud settled over the down and the rain started to drum on helmets. The Danes were lining the ramparts, clashing their weapons against shields as our army curled about their fastness.


'Forward!' Alfred shouted, and we went towards the ramparts, but stopped just out of bowshot.

Rain headed the rim of my shield. There was a new, bright scar in the iron there, a blade strike, but I had not been aware of the blow. The Danes mocked us. They knew what was coming, and they probably welcomed it. Ever since Guthrum had climbed the escarpment and discovered the fort he had probably imagined Alfred's men assaulting its walls and his men cutting the enemy down as we struggled up the steep banks. This was Guthrum's battle now. He had placed his rival, Svein, and his Saxon ally, Wulfhere, outside the fort, and doubtless he had hoped they could destroy a good part of our army before the assault on the ramparts, but it would not matter much to Guthrum that those men had been destroyed themselves. Now his own men would fight the battle he had always envisaged.


'In the name of God!' Alfred called, then said no more for suddenly a clap of thunder crashed, a vast sound that consumed the heavens and was so loud that some of us flinched. A crack of lightning splintered white inside the fort. The rain pelted now, a cloudburst that hammered and soaked us, and more thunder rolled away in the distance, and perhaps we thought that noise and savage light was a message from God for suddenly the whole army started forward. No one had given a command, unless Alfred's invocation was an order. We just went.


Men were shouting as they advanced. They were not calling insults, but just making a noise to give themselves courage. We did not run, but walked, because the shields had to be kept close. Then another bellow of thunder deafened us, and the rain seemed to have a new and vicious intensity. it seethed of the dead and the living, and we were close now, very close, yet the rain was so thick it was hard to see the waiting Danes. Then 1 saw the ditch, already flooding, and the bows sounded and the spears flew and we were splashing down the ditch's side and Danish spears were thumping into us.

One stuck in my shield, fell away and I stumbled on its shaft, half sprawled in the water, then recovered and began the climb.


Not all the army tried to cross the ditch. Many men's courage faltered at the brink, but a dozen or more groups went into the attack. We were what the Danes call the svinfylkjas, the swinewedges, the elite warriors who try to pierce the skjaldborg like a boar trying to gouge the hunter with its tusks. But this time we not only had to gouge the skjaldborq, but cross the rain-flooded ditch and clamber up the bank.


We held our shields over our heads as we splashed through the ditch. Then we climbed, but the wet bank was so slippery that we constantly fell back, and the Danish spears kept coming, and someone pushed me from behind and I was crawling up the bank on my knees, the shield over my head, and Pyrlig's shield was covering my spine and I heard a thumping above me and thought it was thunder.

Except the shield kept banging against my helmet and I knew a Dane was hacking at me, trying to break through the limewood to drive his axe or sword into my spine, and I crawled again, lifted the shield's lower edge and saw boots. I lunged with Serpent-Breath, tried to stand, felt a blow on my leg and fell again. Steapa was roaring beside me. There was mud in my mouth, and the rain hammered at us and I could hear the crash of blades sinking in shields and I knew we had failed, but I tried to stand again and lunged with Serpent-Breath and on my left Leofric gave a shrill cry and I saw blood streaming into the grass. The blood was instantly washed away by the rain, and another peal of thunder crashed overhead as I slithered back to the ditch.


The bank was scarred where we had tried to climb, the grass had been gouged down to the white chalk. We had failed utterly and the Danes were screaming defiance, then another rush of men splashed through the ditch and the banging of blades and shields began again. I climbed a second time, trying to dig my boots into the chalk, and my shield was raised so I did not see the Danes coming down to meet me, and the first I knew was when an axe struck the shield so hard that the boards splintered, and a second axe gave me a glancing blow on the helmet and I fell backwards and would have lost Serpent-Breath if it had not been for the loop of Iseult's hair about my wrist. Steapa managed to seize a Danish spear and pulled its owner down the bank where a half-dozen Saxons hacked and stabbed in-fury so that the ditch was churning with water, blood and blades, and someone shouted for us to go again, and I saw it was Alfred, dismounted, coming to cross the ditch and I roared for my men to protect him.


Pyrlig and I managed to get in front of the king and we stayed there, protecting him as we tried to climb that blood-fouled bank a third time. Pyrlig was screaming in his native tongue, I was cursing in Danish, and somehow we got halfway up and stayed on our feet, and someone, perhaps it was Alfred, was pushing me from behind. Rain hammered us, soaked us. A peal of thunder shook the heavens and I swung Serpent-Breath, trying to hack the Danish shields aside, then swung again, and the shock of the blade striking a shield boss jarred up my arm. A Dane, all beard and wide eyes, lunged a spear at me. I lunged back with the sword, shouted Iseult's name, tried to climb and the Spear-Dane slammed his spear forward again, and the blade struck my helmet's forehead and my head snapped back and another Dane hit me on the side of the head and all the world went drunken and dark. My feet slid and I was half aware of falling down into the ditch-water. Someone pulled me clear and dragged me back to the ditch's far side, and there I tried to stand, but fell again.


The king. The king. He had to be protected and he had been in the ditch when I had last seen him, and I knew Alfred was no warrior. He was brave, but he did not love the slaughter as a warrior loves it.

I tried to stand again, and this time succeeded, but blood squelched in my right boot and flowed over the boot-top when I put my weight on that leg. The ditch bottom was thick with dead and dying men, half drowned by the flood, but the living had fled from the ditch and the Danes were laughing at us.


'To me!' I shouted. There had to be one last effort. Steapa and Pyrlig closed on me, and Eadric was there, and I was groggy and my head was filled with a ringing sound and my arm seemed feeble, but we had to make that last effort.


'Where's the king?' I asked.


'I threw him out of the ditch,' Pyrlig said.


‘Is he safe?'


'I told the priests to hold him down. Told them to hit him if he tried to go again.'


'One more attack,' I said. I did not want to make it. I did not want to clamber over the bodies in the ditch and try to climb that impossible wall, and I knew it was stupid, knew I would probably die if I went again, but we were warriors and warriors will not be beaten. It is reputation. It is pride. It is the madness of battle. I began beating Serpent-Breath against my half-broken shield, and other men took up the rhythm, and the Danes, so close, were inviting us to come and be killed, and I shouted that we were coming.


'God help us,' Steapa said.


'God help us,' Pyrlig echoed.


I did not want to go. I was frightened, but I feared being called a coward more than I feared the ramparts, and so I screamed at my men to slaughter the bastards, and then I ran. I jumped over the corpse's in the ditch, lost my footing on the far side, fell on my shield and rolled aside so that no Dane could plunge a spear into my unprotected back. I hauled myself up and my helmet had skewed in the fall so that the face-plate half blinded me, and I fumbled it straight with my sword hand as I began to climb and Steapa was there, and Pyrlig was with me, and I waited for the first hard Danish blow.


It did not come. I struggled up the bank, the shield over my head, and I expected the death blow, but there was silence and I lifted the shield and thought I must have died for all I saw was the rain-filled sky. The Danes had gone. One moment they had been sneering at us, calling us women and cowards, and boasting how they would slice open our bellies and feed our guts to the ravens, and now they were gone. I clambered to the top of the wall and saw a second ditch and second wall beyond, and the Danes were scrambling up that inner rampart and I supposed that they intended to make a defence there, but instead they vanished over its top and Pyrlig grabbed my arm and pulled me on. 'They're running!' he shouted, 'by God, the bastards are running!' He had to shout to make himself heard over the rain.


'On! On!' someone shouted, and we ran into the second flooded ditch and up over the undefended inner bank and I saw Osric's men, the fyrd of Wiltunscir that had been defeated in the opening moments of the fight, had managed to cross the fort's walls. We learned later that they had gone into the valley where the white horse lay dead, and in the blinding rain they had made it to the fort's eastern corner which, because Guthrum thought it unapproachable, was only lightly defended. The rampart was lower there, hardly more than a grassy ridge on the valley's slope, and they had flooded over the wall and so got behind the other defenders.


Who now ran. If they had stayed then they would have been slaughtered to a man, so they fled across the fort's wide interior, and some were slow to realise that the battle was lost and those we trapped. I just wanted to kill for Iseult's sake, and I put two fugitives down, hacking them with Serpent-Breath with such fury that she cut through mail, leather and flesh to bite as deep as an axe. I was screaming my anger, wanting more victims, but we were too many and the trapped Danes were too few.

The rain kept falling and the thunder bellowed as I looked about for enemies to kill, and then I saw one last group of them, back to back, fighting off a swarm of Saxons, and I ran towards them and suddenly saw their banner. The eagle's wing. It was Ragnar.


His men, outnumbered and overwhelmed, were dying.


'Let him live!' I shouted, 'let him live!' and three Saxons turned towards me and they saw my long hair and my arm rings bright on my mailed sleeves, and they must have thought I was a Dane for they ran at me, and I fended off the first with Serpent-Breath. The second hammered my shield with his axe, and the third circled behind me and I turned fast, scything Serpent-Breath, shouted that I was a Saxon, but they did not hear me. Then Steapa slammed into them and they scattered, and Pyrlig grabbed my arm, but I shook him off and ran towards Ragnar, who was snarling at the ring of enemies, inviting any one of them to try to kill him. His banner had fallen and his crewmen were dead, but he looked like a war god in his shining mail and with his splintered shield and his long sword and his defiant face, and then the ring began to close. I ran, shouting, and he turned towards me, thinking I had come to kill him, and he raised his sword and I brushed it aside with my shield, threw my arms around him and drove him to the turf.


Steapa and Pyrlig guarded us. They fended off the Saxons, telling them to look for other victims, and I rolled away from Ragnar, who sat up and looked at me with astonishment. I saw that his shield hand was bloody. A blade, cutting through the limewood, had sliced into his palm, hacking down between the fingers so that it looked as though he had two small hands instead of one.


'I must bind that wound,' I said.


'Uhtred,' he just said, as if he did not really believe it was me.


'I looked for you,' I told him, 'because I did not want to fight you.'


He flinched as he shook the shattered remnants of the shield away from his wounded hand. I could see Bishop Alewold running across the fort in mud-spattered robes, waving his arms and shouting that God had delivered the pagans into our hands.


'I told Guthrum to fight outside the fort,' Ragnar said. 'We would have killed you all.'


'You would,' I agreed. By staying in the fort, Guthrum had let us defeat his army piece by piece, but even so it was a miracle that the day was ours.


'You're bleeding,' Ragnar said. I had taken a spear blade in the back of my right thigh. I have the scar to this day.


Pyrlig cut a strip of cloth from a dead man's jerkin and used it to bind Ragnar's hand. He wanted to bandage my thigh, but the bleeding had lessened and I managed to stand, though the pain, which I had not felt ever since the wound had been given, suddenly struck me. I touched Thor's hammer. We had won.


'They killed my woman,' I told Ragnar.


He said nothing, but just stood beside me and, because my thigh was agony and I suddenly felt weak, I put an arm about his shoulders.


'Iseult, she was called,' I said, 'and my son is dead too.' I was glad it was raining or else the tears on my face would have shown.


'Where's Brida?'


'I sent her down the hill,' Ragnar told me. We were limping together towards the fort's northern ramparts.


'And you stayed?'


'Someone had to stay as a rearguard,' he said bleakly. I think he was crying too, because of the shame of the defeat. It was a battle Guthrum' could not lose, yet he had.


Pyrlig and Steapa were still with me, and I could see Eadric stripping a dead Dane of his mail, but there was no sign of Leofric. I asked Pyrlig where he was, and Pyrlig gave me a pained look and shook his head.


'Dead?' I asked.


'An axe,' he said, 'in the spine.' I was numb, too numb to speak, for it did not seem possible that the indestructible Leofric was dead, but he was, and I wished I could give him a Danish funeral, a fire-funeral, so that the smoke of his corpse would rise to the halls of the gods. 'I'm sorry,' Pyrlig said.


'The price of Wessex,' I said, and then we climbed the northern ramparts, that were crowded with Alfred's soldiers.


The rain was lessening, though it still fell in great swathes across the plain below. It was as if we stood on the rim of the world, and ahead of us was an immensity of cloud and rain, while beneath us, on the long steep slope, hundreds of Danes scrambled to the foot of the escarpment where their horses had been left.


'Guthrum,' Ragnar said bitterly. 'He lives!'


'He was the first to run,' he said. 'Svein told him we should fight outside the walls,' he went on, 'but Guthrum feared defeat more than he ever wanted victory.'


A cheer sounded as Alfred's banners were carried across the captured fort to the northern ramparts. Alfred, mounted again, and with a bronze circlet about his helmet, rode with the flags Beocca was on his knees giving thanks, while Alfred had a dazed smile and a look of disbelief, and I swear he wept as his standards were rammed into the turf at the world's edge. The dragon and the cross flew above his kingdom that had almost been lost, but had been saved so that there was still one Saxon King in England.


But Leofric was dead and Iseult was a corpse and a hard rain fell across the land we had rescued.


The

e End


Hist

s o

t ri

r c

i al lNot

o e

t


The Westbury white horse is cut into the chalk of the escarpment beneath Bratton Camp on the edge of the Wiltshire Downs. From the north it can be seen for miles, The present horse, a handsome beast, is over a hundred feet long and almost two hundred feet high and was cut in the 1770s, making it the oldest of Wiltshire's ten white horses, but local legend says that it replaced a much older horse that was blazoned into the chalk hillside after the battle of Ethandun in 878.


I should like to think that legend is true, but no historian can be certain of the location of the battle of Ethandun, where Alfred met Guthrum's Danes, though Bratton Camp, above the village of Edington, is the prime candidate. Bratton Camp is an Iron Age fortress which still stands just above the Westbury white horse. John Peddie, in his useful book, Alfred, Warrior King, places Ethandun at Bratton Camp, and Edgar's Stone at Kingston Deverill in the Wylye valley, and I am persuaded by his reasoning.


There is no debate about the location of Æthelingaeg. That is now Athelney, in the Somerset Levels, near Taunton, and if Bratton Camp is substantially unaltered since 878, the levels are changed utterly.

Today, mostly thanks to the, medieval monks who dyked and drained the land, they make a wide, fertile plain, but in the ninth century they were a vast swamp mingled with tidal flats, an almost impenetrable marsh into which Alfred retreated after the disaster at Chippenham.


That disaster was the result of his generosity in agreeing the truce which allowed Guthrum to leave Exeter and retreat to Gloucester in Danish-held Mercia. That truce was secured by Danish hostages, but Guthrum, just as he had broken the truce arranged at Wareham in 876, again proved untrustworthy and, immediately after Twelfth Night, attacked and captured Chippenham, thus precipitating the greatest crisis of Alfred's long reign. The king was defeated and most of his country taken by the Danes. Some great nobles, Wulfhere, the Ealdorman of Wiltshire, among them, defected to the enemy, and Alfred's kingdom was reduced to the watery wastes of the Somerset Levels. Yet in the spring, just four months after the disaster at Chippenham, Alfred assembled an army, led it to Ethandun, and there defeated Guthrum. All that happened. What, sadly, did not probably happen is the burning of the cakes. That story, how a peasant woman struck Alfred after he allowed her cakes to burn, is the most famous folk tale attached to Alfred, but its source is very late and thus very unreliable.


Alfred, Ælswith, Wulfhere, Æthelwold and Brother (later Bishop) Asser all existed, as did Guthrum.

Svein is a fictional character. The great Danish enemies before Guthrum had been the three Lothbrok brothers, and the defeat of the last of them at the battle of Cynuit occurred while Alfred was at Athelney. For fictional reasons I moved that Saxon victory forward a year, and it forms the ending of The Last Kingdom, the novel which precedes The Pale Horseman, which meant I had to invent a character, Svein, and a skirmish, the burning of Svein's ships, to replace Cynuit.


The two primary sources for Alfred's reign are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bishop Asser's life of the king, and neither, alas, tells us much about how Alfred defeated Guthrum at Ethandun. Both armies, by later standards, were small, and it is almost certain that Guthrum considerably outnumbered Alfred. The West Saxon fyrd that won Ethandun. was mostly drawn from Somerset, Wiltshire and western Hampshire, suggesting that all eastern Wessex, and most of the north of the country, had been subdued by the Danes. We know the fyrd of Devonshire was intact (it had won the victory at Cynuit, as was the fyrd of Dorset, yet neither are mentioned as part of Alfred's army, suggesting that they were held back to deter a seaborne attack. The lack of the fyrds from those two powerful shires, if indeed they were absent, only confirms what a remarkable victory Alfred won.


The Saxons had been in Britain since the fifth century. By the ninth century they ruled almost all of what is now England, but then the Danes came and the Saxon kingdoms crumbled. The Last Kingdom tells of the defeat of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, and The Pale Horseman describes how Wessex almost followed those northern neighbours into history's oblivion. For a few months in early 878 the idea of England, its culture and language, were reduced to a few square miles of swamp.

One more defeat and there would probably never have been a political entity called England. We might


have had a Daneland instead, and this novel would probably have been written in Danish. Yet Alfred survived, he won, and that is why history awarded him the honorific 'the Great'. His successors were to finish his work, they were to take back the three northern kingdoms and so, for the first time, unite the Saxon lands into one kingdom called England, but that work was begun by Alfred the Great.


Yet in 878, even after the victory at Ethandun, that must have seemed an impossible dream. It is a long way from Ethandun's white horse to the bleak moors north of Hadrian's Wall, so Uhtred and his companions must campaign again.


Bernard Cornwell






ТЕЛЕГРАМ

Канал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками

Книжный Вестник

Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)

Поиск книг

Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах

Любовные романы

О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте

Саморазвитие

Детективы и триллеры, все новинки

Детективы

Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки

Фантастика

Отборные классические книги

Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕ

Цитаты, афоризмы, стихи, книжные подборки, обсуждения и многое другое

Книжный Вестник
БИБЛИОТЕКИ

Библиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории

Любовные романы

Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров

Фантастика

Самые популярные книги в формате фб2

Топ фб2 книги