What he saw was the end of a slaughter as the West Saxon horsemen chopped into the last of the foragers. A few of the enemy were put down by our arrows, but neither the Danes nor the English had many bowmen. I like bowmen. They can kill at a great distance and, even if their arrows do not kill, they make an enemy nervous. Advancing into arrows is a blind business, for you must keep your head beneath the rim of the shield, but shooting a bow is a great skill. It looks easy, and every child has a bow and some arrows, but a man’s bow, a bow capable of killing a stag at a hundred paces, is a huge thing, carved from yew and needing immense strength to haul, and the arrows fly wild unless a man has practiced constantly, and so we never had more than a handful of archers. I never mastered the bow. With a spear, an ax, or a sword I was lethal, but with a bow I was like most men, useless.
I sometimes wonder why we did not stay behind our wall. It was virtually finished, and to reach it the enemy must cross the ditch or file over the four bridges, and they would have been forced to do that under a hail of arrows, spears, and throwing axes. They would surely have failed, but then they might have besieged us behind that wall and so Ragnar decided to attack them. Not just Ragnar. While Ragnar was gathering men at the northern gate, Halfdan had been doing the same at the southern end, and when both believed they had enough men, and while the enemy infantry was still some two hundred paces away, Ragnar ordered the gate opened and led his men through.
The West Saxon army, under its great dragon banner, was advancing toward the central bridges, evidently thinking that the slaughter there was a foretaste of more slaughter to come. They had no ladders, so how they thought they would cross the newly made wall I do not know, but sometimes in battle a kind of madness descends and men do things without reason. The men of Wessex had no reason to concentrate on the center of our wall, especially as they could not hope to cross it, but they did, and now our men swarmed from the two flanking gates to attack them from north and south.
“Shield wall!” Ragnar roared. “Shield wall!”
You can hear a shield wall being made. The best shields are made of lime, or else of willow, and the wood knocks together as men overlap the shields. Left side of the shield in front of your neighbor’s right side, that way the enemy, most of whom are right-handed, must try to thrust through two layers of wood.
“Make it tight!” Ragnar called. He was in the center of the shield wall, in front of his ragged eagle-wing standard, and he was one of the few men with an expensive helmet, which would mark him to the enemy as a chieftain, a man to be killed. Ragnar still used my father’s helmet, the beautiful one made by Ealdwulf with the faceplate and the inlay of silver. He also wore a mail shirt, again one of the few men to possess such a treasure. Most men were armored in leather.
The enemy was turning outward to meet us, making their own shield wall, and I saw a group of horsemen galloping up their center behind the dragon banner. I thought I saw Beocca’s red hair among them and that made me certain Alfred was there, probably among a gaggle of black-robed priests who were doubtless praying for our deaths.
The West Saxon shield wall was longer than ours. It was not only longer, but thicker, because while our wall was backed by three ranks of men, theirs had five or six. Good sense would have dictated that we either stay where we were and let them attack us, or that we retreat back across the bridge and ditch, but more Danes were coming to thicken Ragnar’s ranks and Ragnar himself was in no mood to be sensible. “Just kill them!” he screamed. “Just kill them! Kill them!” And he led the line forward and, without any pause, the Danes gave a great war shout and surged with him. Usually the shield walls spend hours staring at each other, calling out insults, threatening, and working up the courage to that most awful of moments when wood meets wood and blade meets blade, but Ragnar’s blood was fired and he did not care. He just charged.
That attack made no sense, but Ragnar was furious. He had been offended by Æthelwulf’s victory, and insulted by the way their horsemen had cut down our foragers, and all he wanted to do was hack into the Wessex ranks, and somehow his passion spread through his men so that they howled as they ran forward. There is something terrible about men eager for battle.
A heartbeat before the shields clashed our rearmost men threw their spears. Some had three or four spears that they hurled one after the other, launching them over the heads of our front ranks. There were spears coming back, and I plucked one from the turf and hurled it back as hard as I could.
I was in the rearmost rank, pushed back there by men who told me to get out of their way, but I advanced with them and Brida, grinning with mischief, came with me. I told her to go back to the town, but she just stuck her tongue out at me and then I heard the hammering crash, the wooden thunder, of shields meeting shields. That was followed by the sound of spears striking limewood, the ringing of blade on blade, but I saw nothing of it because I was not then tall enough, but the shock of the shield walls made the men in front of me reel back, then they were pushing forward again, trying to force their own front rank through the West Saxon shields. The right-hand side of our wall was bending back where the enemy outflanked us, but our reinforcements were hurrying to that place, and the West Saxons lacked the courage to charge home. Those West Saxons had been at the rear of their advancing army, and the rear is always where the timid men congregate. The real fight was to my front and the noise there was of blows, iron shield boss on shield wood, blades on shields, men’s feet shuffling, the clangor of weapons, and few voices except those wailing in pain or in a sudden scream. Brida dropped onto all fours and wriggled between the legs of the men in front of her, and I saw she was lancing her spear forward to give the blow that comes beneath the shield’s rim. She lunged into a man’s ankle, he stumbled, an ax fell, and there was a gap in the enemy line. Our line bulged forward, and I followed, using Serpent-Breath as a spear, jabbing at men’s boots, then Ragnar gave a mighty roar, a shout to stir the gods in the great sky halls of Asgard, and the shout asked for one more great effort. Swords chopped, axes swung, and I could sense the enemy retreating from the fury of the Northmen.
Good lord deliver us.
Blood on the grass now, so much blood that the ground was slick, and there were bodies that had to be stepped over as our shield wall thrust forward, leaving Brida and me behind, and I saw her hands were red because blood had seeped down the long ash shaft of her spear. She licked the blood and gave me a sly smile. Halfdan’s men were fighting on the enemy’s farther side now, their battle noise suddenly louder than ours because the West Saxons were retreating from Ragnar’s attack, but one man, tall and well built, resisted us. He had a mail coat belted with a red leather sword belt and a helmet even more glorious that Ragnar’s, for the Englishman’s helmet had a silver boar modeled on its crown, and I thought for a moment it could be King Æthelred himself, but this man was too tall, and Ragnar shouted at his men to stand aside and he swung his sword at the boar-helmeted enemy who parried with his shield, lunged with his sword, and Ragnar took the blow on his own shield and rammed it forward to crash against the man who stepped back, tripped on a corpse, and Ragnar swung his sword overhand, as if he was killing an ox, and the blade chopped down onto the mail coat as a rush of enemy came to save their lord.
A charge of Danes met them, shield on shield, and Ragnar was roaring his victory and stabbing down into the fallen man, and suddenly there were no more Wessex men resisting us, unless they were dead or wounded, and their army was running, their king and their prince both spurring away on horseback surrounded by priests, and we jeered and cursed them, told them they were women, that they fought like girls, that they were cowards.
And then we rested, catching breath on a field of blood, our own corpses among the enemy dead, and Ragnar saw me then, and saw Brida, and laughed. “What are you two doing here?”
For answer Brida held up her bloodied spear and Ragnar glanced at Serpent-Breath and saw her reddened tip. “Fools,” he said, but fondly, and then one of our men brou
ght a West Saxon prisoner and made him inspect the lord whom Ragnar had killed. “Who is he?” Ragnar demanded.
I translated for him.
The man made the sign of the cross. “It is the Lord Æthelwulf,” he said.
And I said nothing.
“What did he say?” Ragnar asked.
“It is my uncle,” I said.
“Ælfric?” Ragnar was astonished. “Ælfric from Northumbria?”
I shook my head. “He is my mother’s brother,” I explained, “Æthelwulf of Mercia.” I did not know that he was my mother’s brother, perhaps there was another Æthelwulf in Mercia, but I felt certain all the same that this was Æthelwulf, my kin, and the man who had won the victory over the earls Sidroc. Ragnar, the previous day’s defeat revenged, whooped for joy while I stared into the dead man’s face. I had never known him, so why was I sad? He had a long face with a fair beard and a trimmed mustache. A good-looking man, I thought, and he was family, and that seemed strange for I knew no family except Ragnar, Ravn, Rorik, and Brida.
Ragnar had his men strip Æthelwulf of his armor and take his precious helmet, and then, because the ealdorman had fought so bravely, Ragnar left the corpse its other clothes and put a sword into its hand so that the gods could take the Mercian’s soul to the great hall where brave warriors feast with Odin.
And perhaps the Valkyries did take his soul, because the next morning, when we went out to bury the dead, Ealdorman Æthelwulf’s body was gone.
I heard later, much later, that he was indeed my uncle. I also heard that some of his own men had crept back to the field that night and somehow found their lord’s body and taken it to his own country for a Christian burial.
And perhaps that is true, too. Or perhaps Æthelwulf is in Odin’s corpse hall.
But we had seen the West Saxons off. And we were still hungry. So it was time to fetch the enemy’s food.
Why did I fight for the Danes? All lives have questions, and that one still haunts me, though in truth there was no mystery. To my young mind the alternative was to be sitting in some monastery learning to read, and give a boy a choice like that and he would fight for the devil rather than scratch on a tile or make marks on a clay tablet. And there was Ragnar, whom I loved, and who sent his three ships across the Temes to find hay and oats stored in Mercian villages and he found just enough so that by the time the army marched westward our horses were in reasonable condition.
We were marching on Æbbanduna, another frontier town on the Temes between Wessex and Mercia, and, according to our prisoner, a place where the West Saxons had amassed their supplies. Take Æbbanduna and Æthelred’s army would be short of food, Wessex would fall, England would vanish, and Odin would triumph.
There was the small matter of defeating the West Saxon army first, but we marched just four days after routing them in front of the walls of Readingum, so we were blissfully confident that they were doomed. Rorik stayed behind, for he was sick again, and the many hostages, like the Mercian twins Ceolberht and Ceolnoth, also stayed in Readingum, guarded there by the small garrison we left to watch over the precious ships.
The rest of us marched or rode. I was among the older of the boys who accompanied the army; our job in battle was to carry the spare shields that could be pushed forward through the ranks in battle. Shields got chopped to pieces in fighting. I have often seen warriors fighting with a sword or ax in one hand, and nothing but the iron shield boss hung with scraps of wood in the other. Brida also came with us, mounted behind Ravn on his horse, and for a time I walked with them, listening as Ravn rehearsed the opening lines of a poem called “The Fall of the West Saxons.” He had got as far as listing our heroes, and describing how they readied themselves for battle, when one of those heroes, the gloomy Earl Guthrum, rode alongside us. “You look well,” he greeted Ravn in a tone that suggested it was a condition unlikely to last.
“I cannot look at all,” Ravn said. He liked puns.
Guthrum, swathed in a black cloak, looked down at the river. We were advancing along a low range of hills and, even in the winter sunlight, the river valley looked lush. “Who will be king of Wessex?” he asked.
“Halfdan?” Ravn suggested mischievously.
“Big kingdom,” Guthrum said gloomily. “Could do with an older man.” He looked at me sourly. “Who’s that?”
“You forget I am blind,” Ravn said, “so who is who? Or are you asking me which older man you think should be made king? Me, perhaps?”
“No, no! The boy leading your horse. Who is he?”
“That is the earl Uhtred,” Ravn said grandly, “who understands that poets are of such importance that their horses must be led by mere earls.”
“Uhtred? A Saxon?”
“Are you a Saxon, Uhtred?”
“I’m a Dane,” I said.
“And a Dane,” Ravn went on, “who wet his sword at Readingum. Wet it, Guthrum, with Saxon blood.” That was a barbed comment, for Guthrum’s black-clothed men had not fought outside the walls.
“And who’s the girl behind you?”
“Brida,” Ravn said, “who will one day be a skald and a sorceress.”
Guthrum did not know what to say to that. He glowered at his horse’s mane for a few strides, then returned to his original subject. “Does Ragnar want to be king?”
“Ragnar wants to kill people,” Ravn said. “My son’s ambitions are very few, merely to hear jokes, solve riddles, get drunk, give rings, lie belly to belly with women, eat well, and go to Odin.”
“Wessex needs a strong man,” Guthrum said obscurely, “a man who understands how to govern.”
“Sounds like a husband,” Ravn said.
“We take their strongholds,” Guthrum said, “but we leave half their land untouched! Even Northumbria is only half garrisoned. Mercia has sent men to Wessex, and they’re supposed to be on our side. We win, Ravn, but we don’t finish the job.”
“And how do we do that?” Ravn asked.
“More men, more ships, more deaths.”
“Deaths?”
“Kill them all!” Guthrum said with a sudden vehemence. “Every last one! Not a Saxon alive.”
“Even the women?” Ravn asked.
“We could leave some young ones,” Guthrum said grudgingly, then scowled at me. “What are you looking at, boy?”
“Your bone, lord,” I said nodding at the gold-tipped bone hanging in his hair.
He touched the bone. “It’s one of my mother’s ribs,” he said. “She was a good woman, a wonderful woman, and she goes with me wherever I go. You could do worse, Ravn, than make a song for my mother. You knew her, didn’t you?”
“I did indeed,” Ravn said blandly. “I knew her well enough, Guthrum, to worry that I lack the poetic skills to make a song worthy of such an illustrious woman.”
The mockery flew straight past Guthrum the Unlucky. “You could try,” he said. “You could try, and I would pay much gold for a good song about her.”
He was mad, I thought, mad as an owl at midday, and then I forgot him because the army of Wessex was ahead, barring our road and offering battle.
The dragon banner of Wessex was flying on the summit of a long low hill that lay athwart our road. To reach Æbbanduna, which evidently lay a short way beyond the hill and was hidden by it, we would need to attack up the slope and across that ridge of open grassland, but to the north, where the hills fell away to the river Temes, there was a track along the river, which suggested we might skirt the enemy position. To stop us he would need to come down the hill and give battle on level ground.
Halfdan called the Danish leaders together and they talked for a long time, evidently disagreeing about what should be done. Some men wanted to attack uphill and scatter the enemy where they were, but others advised fighting the West Saxons in the flat river meadows, and in the end Earl Guthrum the Unlucky persuaded them to do both. That, of course, meant splitting our army into two, but even so I thought it was a clever idea. Ragnar, Guthrum, and the two earl
s Sidroc would go down to the lower ground, thus threatening to pass by the enemy-held hill, while Halfdan, with Harald and Bagseg, would stay on the high ground and advance toward the dragon banner on the ridge. That way the enemy might hesitate to attack Ragnar for fear that Halfdan’s troops would fall on their rear. Most likely, Ragnar said, the enemy would decide not to fight at all, but instead retreat to Æbbanduna where we could besiege them. “Better to have them penned in a fortress than roaming around,” he said cheerfully.
“Better still,” Ravn commented drily, “not to divide the army.”
“They’re only West Saxons,” Ragnar said dismissively.
It was already afternoon and, because it was winter, the day was short so there was not much time, though Ragnar thought there was more than enough daylight remaining to finish off Æthelred’s troops. Men touched their charms, kissed sword hilts, hefted shields; then we were marching down the hill, going off the chalk grasslands into the river valley. Once there, we were half hidden by the leafless trees, but now and again I could glimpse Halfdan’s men advancing along the hillcrests and I could see there were West Saxon troops waiting for them, which suggested that Guthrum’s plan was working and that we could march clear around the enemy’s northern flank. “What we do then,” Ragnar said, “is climb up behind them, and the bastards will be trapped. We’ll kill them all!”
“One of them has to stay alive,” Ravn said.
“One? Why?”
“To tell the tale, of course. Look for their poet. He’ll be handsome. Find him and let him live.”
Ragnar laughed. There were, I suppose, about eight hundred of us, slightly fewer than the contingent that had stayed with Halfdan, and the enemy army was probably slightly larger than our two forces combined, but we were all warriors and many of the West Saxon fyrd were farmers forced to war and so we saw nothing but victory.