Sword Song: The Battle for London

  “An uncle who is going to give your husband victory,” I told her, “but I need men. And Egbert won’t give me men.”

  “He won’t?” she asked.

  “He says he needs all his men to guard you.”

  “Give him your best men,” she said to Egbert in a light, pleasant voice.

  “My lady,” Egbert said, “my orders are to…”

  “You will give him your best men!” Æthelflaed’s voice was suddenly hard as she stepped from beneath my cloak into the harsh light of the campfires. “I am a king’s daughter!” she said arrogantly, “and wife to Mercia’s Ealdorman! And I am demanding that you give Uhtred your best men! Now!”

  She had spoken very loudly so that men all across the island were staring at her. Egbert looked offended, but said nothing. He straightened instead and looked stubborn. Pyrlig caught my eye and smiled slyly.

  “None of you have the courage to fight alongside Uhtred?” Æthelflaed demanded of the watching men. She was fourteen years old, a slight, pale girl, yet in her voice was the lineage of ancient kings. “My father would want you to show courage tonight!” she went on, “or am I to return to Wintanceaster and tell my father that you sat by the fires while Uhtred fought?” This last question was directed at Egbert.

  “Twenty men,” I pleaded with him.

  “Give him more!” Æthelflaed said firmly.

  “There’s only room in the boats for forty more,” I said.

  “Then give him forty!” Æthelflaed said.

  “Lady,” Egbert said hesitantly, but stopped when Æthelflaed held up one small hand. She turned to look at me.

  “I can trust you, Lord Uhtred?” she asked.

  It seemed a strange question from a child I had known nearly all her life and I smiled at it. “You can trust me,” I said lightly.

  Her face grew harder and her eyes flinty. Perhaps that was the reflection of the fire from her pupils, but I was suddenly aware that this was far more than a child, she was a king’s daughter. “My father,” she said in a clear voice so that others could hear, “says you are the best warrior in his service. But he does not trust you.”

  There was an awkward silence. Egbert cleared his throat and stared at the ground. “I have never let your father down,” I said harshly.

  “He fears your loyalty is for sale,” she said.

  “He has my oath,” I replied, my voice still harsh.

  “And I want it now,” she demanded and held out a slender hand.

  “What oath?” I asked.

  “That you keep your oath to my father,” Æthelflaed said, “and that you swear loyalty to Saxon over Dane, and that you will fight for Mercia when Mercia asks it.”

  “My lady,” I began, appalled at her list of demands.

  “Egbert!” Æthelflaed interrupted me. “You will give Lord Uhtred no men unless he swears to serve Mercia while I live.”

  “No, lady,” Egbert muttered.

  While she lived? Why had she said that? I remember wondering about those words, and I remember, too, thinking that my plan to capture Lundene hung in the balance. Æthelred had stripped me of the forces I needed, and Æthelflaed had the power to restore my numbers, but to win my victory I had to lock myself in yet another oath that I did not want to swear. What did I care for Mercia? But I cared that night about taking men through a bridge of death to prove that I could do it. I cared about reputation, I cared about my name, I cared about fame.

  I drew Serpent-Breath, knowing that was why she held out her hand, and I gave the blade to her, hilt first. Then I knelt and I folded my hands around hers that, in turn, were clasped about the hilt of my sword. “I swear it, lady,” I said.

  “You swear,” she said, “that you will serve my father faithfully?”

  “Yes, lady.”

  “And, as I live, you will serve Mercia?”

  “As you live, lady,” I said, kneeling in the mud, and wondering what a fool I was. I wanted to be in the north, I wanted to be free of Alfred’s piety, I wanted to be with my friends, yet here I was, swearing loyalty to Alfred’s ambitions and to his golden-haired daughter. “I swear it,” I said, and gave her hands a slight squeeze as a signal of my truthfulness.

  “Give him men, Egbert,” Æthelflaed ordered.

  He gave me thirty and, to give Egbert his due, he gave me his fit men, the young ones, leaving his older and sick warriors to guard Æthelflaed and the camp. So now I led over seventy men and those men included Father Pyrlig. “Thank you, my lady,” I said to Æthelflaed.

  “You could reward me,” she said, and once again sounded childlike, her solemnity gone and her old mischief back.

  “How?”

  “Take me with you?”

  “Never,” I said harshly.

  She frowned at my tone and looked up into my eyes. “Are you angry with me?” she asked in a soft voice.

  “With myself, lady,” I said and turned away.

  “Uhtred!” She sounded unhappy.

  “I will keep the oaths, lady,” I said, and I was angry that I had taken them again, but at least they had provided me with seventy men to take a city, seventy men on board two boats that pushed away from the creek into the Temes’s strong current.

  I was on board Ralla’s boat, the same ship that we had captured from Jarrel, the Dane whose hanged body had long been reduced to a skeleton. Ralla was at the stern, leaning on the steering-oar. “Not sure we should be doing this, lord,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He spat over the side into the black river. “Water’s running too fast. It’ll be spilling through the gap like a waterfall. Even at slack water, lord, that gap can be wicked.”

  “Take it straight,” I said, “and pray to whatever god you believe in.”

  “If we can even see the gap,” he said gloomily. He peered behind, looking for a glimpse of Osric’s boat, but it was swallowed in the darkness. “I’ve seen it done on a falling tide,” Ralla said, “but that was in daylight, and the river wasn’t in spate.”

  “The tide’s falling?” I asked.

  “Like a stone,” Ralla said gloomily.

  “Then pray,” I said curtly.

  I touched the hammer amulet, then the hilt of Serpent-Breath as the boat gathered speed on the surging current. The riverbanks were far off. Here and there was a glimmer of light, evidence of a fire smoldering in a house, while ahead, under the moonless sky, was a dull glow smeared with a black veil, and that, I knew, was the new Saxon Lundene. The glow came from the sullen fires in the town and the veil was the smoke of those fires, and I knew that somewhere beneath that veil Æthelred would be marshalling his men for their advance across the valley of the Fleot and up to the old Roman wall. Sigefrid, Erik, and Haesten would know he was there because someone would have run from the new town to warn the old. Danes, Norsemen, and Frisians, even some masterless Saxons, would be rousing themselves and hurrying to the old city’s ramparts.

  And we swept down the black river.

  No one spoke much. Every man in both boats knew the danger we faced. I edged my way forward between the crouching figures, and Father Pyrlig must have sensed my approach or else a gleam of light reflected from the wolf’s head that served as the silver crest of my helmet because he greeted me before I saw him. “Here, lord,” he said.

  He was sitting on the end of a rower’s bench and I stood beside him, my boots splashing in the bilge water. “Have you prayed?” I asked him.

  “I haven’t stopped praying,” he said seriously. “I sometimes think God must be tired of my voice. And Brother Osferth here is praying.”

  “I’m not a brother,” Osferth said sullenly.

  “But your prayers might work better if God thinks you are,” Pyrlig said.

  Alfred’s bastard son was crouching by Father Pyrlig. Finan had equipped Osferth with a mail coat that had been mended after some Dane had been belly-gutted by a Saxon spear. He also had a helmet, tall boots, leather gloves, a round shield, and both a long-and a short-sword, so
that at least he looked like a warrior. “I’m supposed to send you back to Wintanceaster,” I told him.

  “I know.”

  “Lord,” Pyrlig reminded Osferth.

  “Lord,” Osferth said, though reluctantly.

  “I don’t want to send the king your corpse,” I said, “so stay close to Father Pyrlig.”

  “Very close, boy,” Pyrlig said, “pretend you love me.”

  “Stay behind him,” I ordered Osferth.

  “Forget about being my lover,” Pyrlig said hurriedly, “pretend you’re my dog instead.”

  “And say your prayers,” I finished. There was no other useful advice I could give Osferth, unless it was to strip off his clothes, swim ashore and go back to his monastery. I had as much faith in his fighting skills as Finan, which meant I had none. Osferth was sour, inept, and clumsy. If it had not been for his dead uncle, Leofric, I would have happily sent him back to Wintanceaster, but Leofric had taken me as a young raw boy and had turned me into a sword warrior and so I would endure Osferth for Leofric’s sake.

  We were abreast of the new town now. I could smell the charcoal fires of the smithies, and see the reflected glow of fires flickering deep in alleyways. I looked ahead to where the bridge spanned the river, but all was black there.

  “I need to see the gap,” Ralla called from the steering platform.

  I worked my way aft again, stepping blindly between the crouching men.

  “If I can’t see it,” Ralla heard me coming, “then I can’t try it.”

  “How close are we?”

  “Too close.” There was panic in his voice.

  I clambered up beside him. I could see the old city now, the city on the hills surrounded by its Roman wall. I could see it because the fires in the city made a dull glow and Ralla was right. We were close.

  “We have to make a decision,” he said. “We’ll have to land upriver of the bridge.”

  “They’ll see us if we land there,” I said. The Danes would be certain to have men guarding the river wall upstream of the bridge.

  “So you either die there with a sword in your hand,” Ralla said brutally, “or you drown.”

  I stared ahead and saw nothing. “Then I choose the sword,” I said dully, seeing the death of my desperate idea.

  Ralla took a deep breath to shout at the oarsmen, but the shout never came because, quite suddenly and far ahead, out where the Temes spread and emptied into the sea, a scrap of yellow showed. Not bright yellow, not a wasp’s yellow, but a sour, leprous, dark yellow that leaked through a rent in the clouds. It was dawn beyond the sea, a dark dawn, a reluctant dawn, but it was light, and Ralla neither shouted nor turned the steering-oar to take us into the bank. Instead he touched the amulet at his neck and kept the boat on its headlong course. “Crouch down, lord,” he said, “and hold hard to something.”

  The boat was quivering like a horse before battle. We were helpless now, caught in the river’s grip. The water was sweeping down from far inland, fed by spring rains and subsiding floods, and where it met the bridge it piled itself in great white ragged heaps. It seethed, roared, and foamed between the stone pilings, but in the bridge’s center, where the gap was, it poured in a sheeting, gleaming stream that fell a man’s height to the new water level beyond where the river swirled and grumbled before becoming calm again. I could hear the water fighting the bridge, hear the thunder of it loud as wind-driven breakers assaulting a beach.

  And Ralla steered for the gap, which he could just see outlined against the dull yellow of the broken eastern sky. Behind us was blackness, though once I did see that sour morning light reflect from the water-glossed stem of Osric’s ship and I knew he was close behind us.

  “Hold hard!” Ralla called to our crew, and the ship was hissing, still quivering, and she seemed to race faster, and I saw the bridge come toward us and it loomed black over us as I crouched beside the ship’s side and gripped the timber hard.

  And then we were in the gap, and I had the sensation of falling as though we had tipped into an abyss between the worlds. The noise was deafening. It was the noise of water fighting stone, water tearing, water breaking, water pouring, a noise to fill the skies, a noise louder even than Thor’s thunder, and the ship gave a lurch and I thought she must have struck and would slew sideways and tip us to our deaths, but somehow she straightened and flew on. There was blackness above, the blackness of the stub ends of the bridge’s broken timbers, and then the noise doubled and spray flew across the deck and we were slamming downward, ship tipping, and there was a crack like the gates of Odin’s hall banging shut and I was spilled forward as water cascaded over us. We had struck stone, I thought, and I waited to drown and I even remembered to grip Serpent-Breath’s hilt so I would die with my sword in my hand, but the ship staggered up and I understood the crash had been the bows striking the river beyond the bridge and that we were alive.

  “Row!” Ralla shouted. “Oh you lucky bastards, row!”

  Water was deep in the bilge, but we were afloat, and the eastern sky was ragged with rents and in their shadowy light we could see the city, and see the place where the wall was broken. “And the rest,” Ralla said with pride in his voice, “is up to you, lord.”

  “It’s up to the gods,” I said, and looked behind to see Osric’s boat fighting up from the maelstrom where the river fell. So both our ships had lived, and the current was sweeping us downstream of the place we wished to land, but the oarsmen turned us and fought against the water so that we came to the wharf from the east, and that was good, because anyone watching would assume we had rowed upriver from Beamfleot. They would think we were Danes who had come to reinforce the garrison that now readied itself for Æthelred’s assault.

  There was a large sea-going ship moored in the dock where we wanted to land. I could see her clearly because torches blazed on the white wall of the mansion the dock served. The ship was a fine thing, her stem and stern rearing high and proud. There were no beast-heads on the ship, for no Northman would let his carved heads frighten the spirit of a friendly land. A lone man was on board the ship and he watched us approach. “Who are you?” he shouted.

  “Ragnar Ragnarson!” I called back. I heaved him a line woven from walrus hide. “Has the fighting started?”

  “Not yet, lord,” he said. He took the line and twisted it around the other ship’s stem. “And when it does they’ll get slaughtered!”

  “We’re not too late, then?” I said. I staggered as our ship struck the other, then stepped over the sheer-strakes onto one of the empty rowers’ benches. “Whose ship is this?” I asked the man.

  “Sigefrid’s, lord. The Wave-Tamer.”

  “She’s beautiful,” I said, then turned back. “Ashore!” I shouted in English and watched as my men retrieved shields and weapons from the flooded bilge. Osric’s ship came in behind us, low in the water, and I realized she had been half swamped as she shot the bridge’s gap. Men began clambering onto the Wave-Tamer and the Northman who had taken my line saw the crosses hanging from their necks.

  “You…” he began, and found he had nothing more to say. He half turned to run ashore, but I had blocked his escape. There was shock on his face, shock and puzzlement.

  “Put your hand on your sword hilt,” I said, drawing Serpent-Breath.

  “Lord,” he said, as if about to plead for his life, but then he understood his life was ending because I could not leave him alive. I could not let him go, because then he would warn Sigefrid of our arrival, and if I had tied his hands and feet and left him aboard the Wave-Tamer then some other person might have found and released him. He knew all that, and his face changed from puzzlement to defiance and, instead of just gripping his sword’s hilt, he began to pull the weapon free of its scabbard.

  And died.

  Serpent-Breath took him in the throat. Hard and fast. I felt her tip pierce muscle and tough tissue. Saw the blood. Saw his arm falter and the blade drop back into its scabbard, and I reached out with my left hand to
grip his sword hand and hold it over his hilt. I made sure that he kept hold of his sword as he died, for then he would be taken to the feasting hall of the dead. I held his hand tight and let him collapse onto my chest where his blood ran down my mail. “Go to Odin’s hall,” I told him softly, “and save a place for me.”

  He could not speak. He choked as blood spilled down his windpipe.

  “My name is Uhtred,” I said, “and one day I will feast with you in the corpse-hall and we shall laugh together and drink together and be friends.”

  I let his body drop, then knelt and found his amulet, Thor’s hammer, which I cut from his neck with Serpent-Breath. I put the hammer in a pouch, cleaned my sword’s tip on the dead man’s cloak, then slid the blade back into her fleece-lined scabbard. I took my shield from Sihtric, my servant.

  “Let’s go ashore,” I said, “and take a city.”

  Because it was time to fight.

  FIVE

  Then all, suddenly, was quiet.

  Not really quiet, of course. The river hissed where it ran through the bridge, small waves slapped on the boat hulls, the guttering torches on the house wall crackled, and I could hear my men’s footsteps as they clambered ashore. Shields and spear butts thumped on ships’ timbers, dogs barked in the city, and somewhere a gander was giving its harsh call, but it seemed quiet. Dawn was now a paler yellow, half concealed by dark clouds.

  “And now?” Finan appeared beside me. Steapa loomed beside him, but said nothing.

  “We go to the gate,” I said, “Ludd’s Gate.” But I did not move. I did not want to move. I wanted to be back at Coccham with Gisela. It was not cowardice. Cowardice is always with us, and bravery, the thing that provokes the poets to make their songs about us, is merely the will to overcome the fear. It was tiredness that made me reluctant to move, but not a physical tiredness. I was young then and the wounds of war had yet to sap my strength. I think I was tired of Wessex, tired of fighting for a king I did not like, and, standing on that Lundene wharf, I did not understand why I fought for him. And now, looking back over the years, I wonder if that lassitude was caused by the man I had just killed and whom I had promised to join in Odin’s hall. I believe the men we kill are inseparably joined to us. Their life threads, turned ghostly, are twisted by the Fates around our own thread and their burden stays to haunt us till the sharp blade cuts our life at last. I felt remorse for his death.