Then, as our leading troops marched out of an oakwood, we saw the enemy had followed our example and divided their own army into two. One half was waiting on the hill for Halfdan while the other half had come to meet us.
Alfred led our opponents. I knew that because I could see Beocca’s red hair and, later on, I glimpsed Alfred’s long anxious face in the fighting. His brother, King Æthelred, had stayed on the heights where, instead of waiting for Halfdan to assault him, he was advancing to make his own attack. The Saxons, it seemed, were avid for battle.
So we gave it to them.
Our forces made shield wedges to attack their shield wall. We called on Odin, we howled our war cries, we charged, and the West Saxon line did not break, it did not buckle, but instead held fast and so the slaughterwork began.
Ravn told me time and again that destiny was everything. Fate rules. The three spinners sit at the foot of the tree of life and they make our lives and we are their playthings, and though we think we make our own choices, all our fates are in the spinners’ threads. Destiny is everything, and that day, though I did not know it, my destiny was spun. Wyrd bi ful a ræd, fate is unstoppable.
What is there to say of the battle that the West Saxons said happened at a place they called Æsc’s Hill? I assume Æsc was the thegn who had once owned the land, and his fields received a rich tilth of blood and bone that day. The poets could fill a thousand lines telling what happened, but battle is battle. Men die. In the shield wall it is sweat, terror, cramp, half blows, full blows, screaming, and cruel death.
There were really two battles at Æsc’s Hill, the one above and the other below, and the deaths came swiftly. Harald and Bagseg died, Sidroc the Older watched his son die and then was cut down himself, and with him died Earl Osbern and Earl Fraena, and so many other good warriors, and the Christian priests were calling on their God to give the West Saxon swords strength, and that day Odin was sleeping and the Christian God was awake.
We were driven back. On top of the hill and in the valley we were driven back, and it was only the weariness of the enemy that stopped a full slaughter and let our survivors retreat from the fight, leaving their companions behind in their death blood. Toki was one of them. The shipmaster, so full of sword skill, died in the ditch behind which Alfred’s shield wall had waited for us. Ragnar, blood all over his face and with enemy’s blood matted in his unbound hair, could not believe it. The West Saxons were jeering.
The West Saxons had fought like fiends, like men inspired, like men who know their whole future rested on a winter afternoon’s work, and they had beaten us.
Destiny is all. We were defeated and went back to Readingum.
SIX
These days, whenever Englishmen talk of the battle of Æsc’s Hill, they speak of God giving the West Saxons the victory because King Æthelred and his brother Alfred were praying when the Danes appeared.
Maybe they are right. I can well believe that Alfred was praying, but it helped that he chose his position well. His shield wall was just beyond a deep, winter-flooded ditch and the Danes had to fight their way up from that mud-bottomed trough and they died as they came, and men who would rather have been farmers than warriors beat off an assault of sword Danes, and Alfred led the farmers, encouraged them, told them they could win, and put his faith in God. I think the ditch was the reason that he won, but he would doubtless have said that God dug the ditch.
Halfdan lost as well. He was attacking uphill, climbing a smooth gentle slope, but it was late in the day and the sun was in his men’s eyes, or so they said afterward, and King Æthelred, like Alfred, encouraged his men so well that they launched a howling downhill attack that bit deep into Halfdan’s ranks that became discouraged when they saw the lower army retreating from Alfred’s stubborn defense. There were no angels with fiery swords present, despite what the priests now say. At least I saw none. There was a waterlogged ditch, there was a battle, the Danes lost, and destiny changed.
I did not know the Danes could lose, but at fourteen years old I learned that lesson, and for the first time I heard Saxon cheers and jeers, and something hidden in my soul stirred.
And we went back to Readingum.
There was plenty more fighting as winter turned to spring and spring to summer. New Danes came with the new year, and our ranks were thus restored, and we won all our subsequent encounters with the West Saxons, twice fighting them at Basengas in Hamptonscir, then at Mereton, which was in Wiltunscir and thus deep inside their territory, and again in Wiltunscir at Wiltun, and each time we won, which meant we held the battlefield at day’s end, but at none of those clashes did we destroy the enemy. Instead we wore each other out, fought each other to a bloody standstill, and as summer caressed the land we were no nearer conquering Wessex than we had been at Yule.
But we did manage to kill King Æthelred. That happened at Wiltun where the king received a deep ax wound to his left shoulder and, though he was hurried from the field, and though priests and monks prayed over his sickbed, and though cunning men treated him with herbs and leeches, he died after a few days.
And he left an heir, an ætheling, Æthelwold. He was Prince Æthelwold, eldest son of Æthelred, but he was not old enough to be his own master for, like me, he was only fourteen, yet even so some men proclaimed his right to be named the King of Wessex, but Alfred had far more powerful friends and he deployed the legend of the pope having invested him as the future king. The legend must have worked its magic for, sure enough, at the meeting of the Wessex witan, which was the assembly of nobles, bishops, and powerful men, Alfred was acclaimed as the new king. Perhaps the witan had no choice. Wessex, after all, was desperately fighting off Halfdan’s forces and it would have been a bad time to make a boy into a king. Wessex needed a leader and so the witan chose Alfred, and Æthelwold and his younger brother were whisked off to an abbey where they were told to get on with their lessons. “Alfred should have murdered the little bastards,” Ragnar told me cheerfully, and he was probably right.
So Alfred, the youngest of six brothers, was now the King of Wessex. The year was 871. I did not know it then, but Alfred’s wife had just given birth to a daughter he named Æthelflaed. Æthelflaed was fourteen years younger than me and even if I had known of her birth I would have dismissed it as unimportant. But destiny is all. The spinners work and we do their will whether we will it or not.
Alfred’s first act as king, other than to bury his brother and put his nephews away in a monastery and have himself crowned and go to church a hundred times and weary God’s ears with unceasing prayers, was to send messengers to Halfdan proposing a conference. He wanted peace, it seemed, and as it was midsummer and we were no nearer to victory than we had been at midwinter, Halfdan agreed to the meeting, and so, with his army’s leaders and a bodyguard of picked men, he went to Baum.
I went too, with Ragnar, Ravn, and Brida. Rorik, still sick, stayed in Readingum and I was sorry he did not see Baum for, though it was only a small town, it was almost as marvelous as Lundene. There was a bath in the town’s center, not a small tub, but an enormous building with pillars and a crumbling roof above a great stone hollow that was filled with hot water. The water came from the underworld and Ragnar was certain that it was heated by the forges of the dwarves. The bath, of course, had been built by the Romans, as had all the other extraordinary buildings in Baum’s valley. Not many men wanted to get into the bath because they feared water even though they loved their ships, but Brida and I went in and I discovered she could swim like a fish. I clung to the edge and marveled at the strange experience of having hot water all over my naked skin.
Beocca found us there. The center of Baum was covered by a truce, which meant no man could carry weapons there, and West Saxons and Danes mixed amicably enough in the streets so there was nothing to stop Beocca searching for me. He came to the bath with two other priests, both gloomy-looking men with running noses, and they watched as Beocca leaned down to me. “I saw you come in here,” he said. Then he
noticed Brida who was swimming underwater, her long black hair streaming. She reared up and he could not miss her small breasts and he recoiled as though she were the devil’s handmaid. “She’s a girl, Uhtred!”
“I know,” I said.
“Naked!”
“God is good,” I said.
He stepped forward to slap me, but I pushed myself away from the edge of the bath and he nearly fell in. The other two priests were staring at Brida. God knows why. They probably had wives, but priests, I have found, get very excited about women. So do warriors, but we do not shake like aspens just because a girl shows us her tits. Beocca tried to ignore her, though that was difficult because Brida swam up behind me and put her arms around my waist. “You must slip away,” Beocca whispered to me.
“Slip away?”
“From the pagans! Come to our quarters. We’ll hide you.”
“Who is he?” Brida asked me. She spoke in Danish.
“He was a priest I knew at home,” I said.
“Ugly, isn’t he?” she said.
“You have to come,” Beocca hissed at me. “We need you!”
“You need me?”
He leaned even closer. “There’s unrest in Northumbria, Uhtred. You must have heard what happened.” He paused to make the sign of the cross. “All those monks and nuns slaughtered! They were murdered! A terrible thing, Uhtred, but God will not be mocked. There is to be a rising in Northumbria and Alfred will encourage it. If we can say that Uhtred of Bebbanburg is on our side it will help!”
I doubted it would help at all. I was fourteen and hardly old enough to inspire men into making suicidal attacks on Danish strongholds. “She’s not a Dane,” I told Beocca, who I did not think would have said these things if he believed Brida could understand them. “She’s from East Anglia.”
He stared at her. “East Anglia?”
I nodded, then let mischief have its way. “She’s the niece of King Edmund,” I lied, and Brida giggled and ran a hand down my body to try and make me laugh.
Beocca made the sign of the cross again. “Poor man! A martyr! Poor girl.” Then he frowned. “But…” he began, then stopped, quite incapable of understanding why the dreaded Danes allowed two of their prisoners to frolic naked in a bath of hot water. Then he closed his squinty eyes because he saw where Brida’s hand had come to rest. “We must get you both out of here,” he said urgently, “to a place where you can learn God’s ways.”
“I should like that,” I said and Brida squeezed so hard that I almost cried out in pain.
“Our quarters are to the south of here,” Beocca said, “across the river and on top of the hill. Go there, Uhtred, and we shall take you away. Both of you.”
Of course I did no such thing. I told Ragnar who laughed at my invention that Brida was King Edmund’s niece, and shrugged at the news that there would be an uprising in Northumbria. “There are always rumors of revolts,” he said, “and they all end the same way.”
“He was very certain,” I said.
“All it means is that they’ve sent monks to stir up trouble. I doubt it will amount to much. Anyway, once we’ve settled Alfred we can go back. Go home, eh?”
But settling with Alfred was not as easy as Halfdan or Ragnar had supposed. It was true that Alfred was the supplicant and that he wanted peace because the Danish forces had been raiding deep into Wessex, but he was not ready to collapse as Burghred had yielded in Mercia. When Halfdan proposed that Alfred stay king, but that the Danes occupy the chief West Saxon forts, Alfred threatened to walk out and continue the war. “You insult me,” he said calmly. “If you wish to take the fortresses, then come and take them.”
“We will,” Halfdan threatened and Alfred merely shrugged as if to say the Danes were welcome to try, but Halfdan knew, as all the Danes knew, that their campaign had failed. It was true that we had scoured large swaths of Wessex, we had taken much treasure, slaughtered or captured livestock, burned mills and homes and churches, but the price had been high. Many of our best men were dead or else so badly wounded that they would be forced to live off their lords’ charity for the rest of their days. We had also failed to take a single West Saxon fortress, which meant that when winter came we would be forced to withdraw to the safety of Lundene or Mercia.
Yet if the Danes were exhausted by the campaign, so were the West Saxons. They had also lost many of their best men, they had lost treasure, and Alfred was worried that the Britons, the ancient enemy who had been defeated by his ancestors, might flood out of their fastnesses in Wales and Cornwalum. Yet Alfred would not succumb to his fears, he would not meekly give in to Halfdan’s demands, though he knew he must meet some of them, and so the bargaining went on for a week and I was surprised by Alfred’s stubbornness.
He was not an impressive man to look at. There was something spindly about him, and his long face had a weak cast, but that was a deception. He never smiled as he faced Halfdan, he rarely took those clever brown eyes off his enemy’s face, he pressed his point tediously, and he was always calm, never raising his voice even when the Danes were screaming at him. “What we want,” he explained again and again, “is peace. You need it, and it is my duty to give it to my country. So you will leave my country.” His priests, Beocca among them, wrote down every word, filling precious sheets of parchment with endless lines of script. They must have used every drop of ink in Wessex to record that meeting and I doubt anyone ever read the whole record.
Not that the meetings went on all day. Alfred insisted they could not start until he had attended church, and he broke at midday for more prayer, and he finished before sundown so that he could return to the church. How that man prayed! But his patient bargaining was just as remorseless, and in the end Halfdan agreed to evacuate Wessex, but only on payment of six thousand pieces of silver and, to make sure it was paid, he insisted that his forces must remain in Readingum where Alfred was required to deliver three wagons of fodder daily and five wagons of rye grain. When the silver was paid, Halfdan promised, the ships would slide back down the Temes and Wessex would be free of pagans. Alfred argued against allowing the Danes to stay in Readingum, insisting that they withdraw east of Lundene, but in the end, desperate for peace, he accepted that they could remain in the town and so, with solemn oaths on both sides, the peace was made.
I was not there when the conference ended, nor was Brida. We had been there most days, serving as Ravn’s eyes in the big Roman hall where the talking went on, but when we got bored, or rather when Ravn was tired of our boredom, we would go to the bath and swim. I loved that water.
We were swimming on the day before the talking finished. There were just the two of us in the great echoing chamber. I liked to stand where the water gushed in from a hole in a stone, letting it cascade over my long hair, and I was standing there, eyes closed, when I heard Brida squeal. I opened my eyes and just then a pair of strong hands gripped my shoulders. My skin was slippery and I twisted away, but a man in a leather coat jumped into the bath, told me to be quiet, and seized me again. Two other men were wading across the pool, using long staves to shepherd Brida to the water’s edge. “What are you…” I began to ask, using Danish.
“Quiet, boy,” one of the men answered. He was a West Saxon and there were a dozen of them, and when they had pulled our wet naked bodies out of the water they wrapped us in big, stinking cloaks, scooped up our clothes, and hurried us away. I shouted for help and was rewarded by a thump on my head that might have stunned an ox.
We were pushed over the saddles of two horses and then we traveled for some time with men mounted behind us, and the cloaks were only taken off at the top of the big hill that overlooks Baum from the south. And there, beaming at us, was Beocca. “You are rescued, lord,” he said to me, “praise Almighty God, you are rescued! As are you, my lady,” he added to Brida.
I could only stare at him. Rescued? Kidnapped, more like. Brida looked at me, and I at her, and she gave the smallest shake of her head as if to suggest we should keep silent, at l
east I took it to mean that, and did so. Then Beocca told us to get dressed.
I had slipped my hammer amulet and my arm rings into my belt pouch when I undressed and I left them there as Beocca hurried us into a nearby church, little more than a wood and straw shack that was no bigger than a peasant’s pigsty, and there he gave thanks to God for our deliverance. Afterward he took us to a nearby hall where we were introduced to Ælswith, Alfred’s wife, who was attended by a dozen women, three of them nuns, and guarded by a score of heavily armed men.
Ælswith was a small woman with mouse-brown hair, small eyes, a small mouth, and a very determined chin. She was wearing a blue dress that had angels embroidered in silver thread about its skirt and about the hem of its wide sleeves, and she wore a heavy crucifix of gold. A baby was in a wooden cradle beside her and later, much later, I realized that the baby must have been Æthelflaed, so that was the very first time I ever saw her, though I thought nothing of it at the time. Ælswith welcomed me, speaking in the distinctive tones of a Mercian, and after she had enquired about my parentage, she told me we had to be related because her father was Æthelred who had been an ealdorman in Mercia, and he was first cousin to the late lamented Æthelwulf whose body I had seen outside Readingum. “And now you,” she turned to Brida, “Father Beocca tells me you are niece to the holy King Edmund?”
Brida just nodded.
“But who are your parents?” Ælswith demanded, frowning. “Edmund had no brothers, and his two sisters are nuns.”
“Hild,” Brida said. I knew that had been the name of her aunt, whom Brida had hated.
“Hild?” Ælswith was puzzled, more than puzzled, suspicious. “Neither of good King Edmund’s sisters are called Hild.”
“I’m not his niece,” Brida confessed in a small voice.