‘We’ll rape your wives,’ the man called. He spoke in English. ‘We’ll rape your daughters!’
I was happy enough that he should call such hopes, for they would only encourage my men to fight. ‘What was your mother?’ a Centishman called back. ‘A sow?’
‘If you lay your weapons down,’ the man shouted, ‘then we shall spare you!’ He turned his horse and I recognised him. He was Oscytel, Eohric’s commander, the brutal-looking warrior I had met on Lundene’s wall.
‘Oscytel!’ I shouted.
‘I hear a lamb bleating!’ he called back.
‘Get off your horse,’ I said, taking a step forward, ‘and fight me.’
He rested his hands on his saddle’s pommel and stared at me, then he glanced at the flooded ditch that had sheets of thin ice crusting its water. I knew that was why he had come, not just to insult, but to see what obstacle faced the Danish charge. He looked back to me and grinned. ‘I don’t fight old men,’ he said.
That was strange. No one had ever called me old before. I remember laughing, but there was shock behind my laughter. Weeks before, talking with Æthelflaed, I had mocked her because she was staring at her face in a great silver platter. She was worried because she had lines about her eyes and she had responded to my mockery by thrusting the plate at me, and I had looked at my reflection and seen that my beard was grey. I remember staring at it as she laughed at me, and I did not feel old even though my wounded leg could be treacherously stiff. Was that how people saw me? As an old man? Yet I was forty-five years old that year, so yes, I was an old man. ‘This old man will slit you from the balls to the throat,’ I called to Oscytel.
‘This day Uhtred dies!’ he shouted at my men. ‘And you all die with him!’ With that he circled his horse and spurred back towards the Danish shield wall. Those shields were eighty paces away now. Close enough to see men’s faces, to see the snarls. I could see Jarl Sigurd, magnificent in mail and with a black bear’s pelt humped from his shoulders. His helmet was crested with a raven’s wing, black in the dawn’s grey light. I could see Cnut, the man with the quick sword, his cloak white, his thin face pale, his banner the broken Christian cross. Sigebriht was beside Eohric, who in turn was flanked by Æthelwold, and with them were their fiercest, strongest warriors, the men who had to keep the kings and the jarls and lords alive. Warriors were touching crosses or hammers. They were shouting, but what they bellowed I could not tell because the world seemed silent in that moment. I was watching the enemy ahead, judging which one would come to kill me and how I would kill him first.
My banner was behind me and that banner would attract ambitious men. They wanted my skull as a drinking cup, my name as a trophy. They watched me as I watched them and they saw a man covered in mud, but a warlord with a wolf-crested helmet and arm rings of gold and with close-linked mail and a cloak of darkest blue hemmed with golden threads and a sword that was famous throughout Britain. Serpent-Breath was famous, but I sheathed her anyway, because a long blade is no help in the shield wall’s embrace, and instead I drew Wasp-Sting, short and lethal. I kissed her blade then bellowed my challenge at the winter wind. ‘Come and kill me! Come and kill me!’
And they came.
The spears came first, launched by men in the third or fourth enemy ranks, and we took them on our shields, the blades thumping hard into the willow, and the Danes were screaming as they rushed us. They must have been warned about the ditch, but even so it trapped scores of men who tried to leap it and instead skidded on our bank, their feet flying out from under them as our long-hafted axes flashed down. When we practise the shield wall I put an axeman next to a swordsman, and the axeman’s job is to hook his blade over the rim of the enemy’s shield and haul it down so the sword can slide over the top and into the enemy’s face, but now the axes crunched down through helmets and skulls and suddenly the world exploded in noise, in screams, in the butcher’s sound of blades cleaving skulls, and the men behind the Danes’ first rank were pushing through the ditch and their long spears were thumping into our shields. ‘Close up!’ I bellowed. ‘Shields touching! Shields touching! Forward a pace!’
Our shields overlapped. We had spent hours practising this. Our shields made a wall as we pushed forward to the ditch’s edge where the steepness of the slick bank made the killing easy. A fallen man tried to stab his sword up under my shield, but I kicked him in the face and my iron-reinforced boot slammed into his nose and eyes and he slid back and I was thrusting Wasp-Sting forward, finding the gap between two enemy shields, ramming the stiff short blade through mail into flesh, shouting, always watching their eyes, seeing the axe come down and aware that Cerdic, behind me, caught it on his shield, though the force of the blow hammered his shield down onto my helmet and for a moment I was dazed and blinded, but still grinding Wasp-Sting forward. Rollo, beside me, had hooked a shield down and as my vision cleared I saw the gap and flicked Wasp-Sting into it, saw her tip take an eye, skewered it hard. A massive blow hit my shield, splintering a board.
Cnut was trying to reach me, bellowing at his men to make space, and that was foolish because it meant they lost their cohesion to let their lord come to the killing place. Cnut and his men were in a frenzy, desperate to break our wall, and their shields were not overlapping and the ditch trapped them and two of my men drove spears hard into the oncoming men. Cnut tripped on one and sprawled in the ditch and I saw Rypere’s axe smash into his helmet, only a glancing blow, but hard enough to stun him because he did not get up. ‘They’re dying!’ I shouted. ‘Now kill all the bastards!’
Cnut was not dead, but his men were dragging him away and in his place came Sigurd Sigurdson, the puppy who had promised to kill me, and he screamed wild-eyed as he charged up the ditch, feet flailing for purchase, and I swung my damaged shield outwards to give him a target and like a fool he took it, lunging his sword Fire-Dragon hard at my belly, but the shield came back fast, deflecting Fire-Dragon between my body and Rollo, and I half turned as I drove Wasp-Sting up at his neck. He had forgotten his lessons, forgotten to protect himself with his shield, and the short blade went under his chin, up through his mouth, breaking teeth, piercing his tongue, shattering the small nasal bones and jarring into his skull so hard that I lifted him off the earth for a moment as his blood poured down my hand and inside my mail sleeve, and then I shook him off the blade and swept it backhanded at a Dane who recoiled, fell, and I let another man kill him because Oscytel was coming, shouting that I was an old man, and the battle-joy was in me.
That joy. That madness. The gods must feel this way every moment of every day. It is as if the world slows. You see the attacker, you see him shouting though you hear nothing, and you know what he will do, and all his movements are so slow and yours are so quick, and in that moment you can do no wrong and you will live for ever and your name will be blazoned across the heavens in a glory of white fire because you are the god of battle.
And Oscytel came with his sword, and with him was a man who wanted to hook my shield down with an axe, but I tipped the top back towards me at the last moment and the axe skidded down the painted wood to strike the boss and Oscytel was slamming his sword two-handed at my throat, but the shield was still there and its iron rim caught his blade, trapping the tip, and I thrust the shield forward, unbalancing him, and drove Wasp-Sting under the lower edge, and all my old man’s strength was in that wicked blow that comes from beneath the shield, and I felt the blade’s tip scraping up a thigh bone, ripping blood and flesh and muscle, and into his groin and I heard him then. I heard his scream filling the sky as I gouged his groin and spilled his blood into the ice-shattered ditch.
Eohric saw his champion fall and the sight stopped him at the ditch’s far side. His men stopped with him. ‘Shields!’ I shouted, and my men lined their shields. ‘You’re a coward, Eohric,’ I called, ‘a fat coward, a pig spawned in shit, runt of a sow’s litter, a weakling! Come and die, you fat bastard!’
He did not want to, but the Danes were winning. Not,
perhaps, in the centre of the line where my banner flew, but off to our left the Danes had crossed the ditch and made a shield wall on our side of the obstacle and there they were thrusting Wulferth’s men back. I had left Finan and thirty men as our reserve and they had gone to bolster that flank, but they were hard pressed, hugely outnumbered, and once the Danes came between that flank and the western marsh then they would curl my line in on itself and we would die. The Danes knew it and took confidence from it, and still more men came to kill me because my name was the name that the poets would give to their glory, and Eohric was thrust across the ditch with the rest of the men and they tripped on the dead, slipped in the mud, climbed over their own dead, and we screamed our war song as the axes fell and the spears stabbed and the swords cut. My shield was in scraps, hacked by blades. My head was bruised, I could feel blood on my left ear, but still we were fighting and killing, and Eohric was gritting his teeth and flailing with a huge sword at Cerdic, who had replaced the man on my left. ‘Hook him,’ I snarled at Cerdic, and he brought his axe up from beneath and the beard of the blade snagged in Eohric’s mail and Cerdic hauled him forward and I hacked Wasp-Sting down on the back of his fat neck and he was screaming as he fell at our feet. His men tried to rescue him, and I saw him stare up at me in despair, and he clenched his teeth so hard that they shattered and we killed King Eohric of East Anglia in a ditch that stank of blood and shit. We stabbed him and slashed him, cut him and trampled him. We screamed like demons. Men were calling on Jesus, calling for their mothers, shrieking in pain, and a king died with a mouth full of broken teeth in a ditch turned red. East Anglians tried to haul Eohric away, but Cerdic kept hold of him and I hacked at his neck, and then I shouted to the East Anglians that their king was dead, that their king was killed, that we were winning.
Only we were not winning. We were indeed fighting like demons, we were giving the poets a tale to tell in the years to come, but the song would end with our deaths because our left flank gave way. They still fought, but they bent back, and the Danes streamed into the gap. The men who had ridden to take us in the rear had no need to come now, because we had been turned, and now we would form a shield wall that faced in every direction and that wall would shrink and shrink and we would go to our graves one by one.
I saw Æthelwold. He was on horseback now, riding behind some Danes, shouting them onwards and with him was a standard-bearer who flew the dragon flag of Wessex. He knew he would become king if they won this battle and he had abandoned his white stag banner to adopt Alfred’s flag instead. He had still not crossed the ditch and he was taking care not to be in the fighting, but instead exhorted the Danes forward to kill us.
Then I forgot Æthelwold because our left flank was pushed hard back and we had become a band of Saxons trapped by a horde of Danes. We made a rough circle, surrounded by shields and by the men we had killed. By our own dead too. And the Danes paused to make a new shield wall, to rescue their wounded and to contemplate their victory.
‘I killed that bastard Beortsig,’ Finan said as he joined me.
‘Good, I hope it hurt.’
‘It sounded that way,’ he said. His sword was bloody, his grinning face smirched with blood. ‘It’s not very healthy, is it?’
‘Not really,’ I said. It had begun to rain again, just a small spitting rain. Our defensive circle was close to the eastern marsh. ‘What we could do,’ I said, ‘is tell the men to run into the marsh and go south. Some will get away.’
‘Not many,’ Finan said. We could see the Danes collecting the Centish horses. They were stripping our dead of their mail, their weapons and whatever else they could find. A priest was in the centre of our men, on his knees, praying. ‘They’ll hunt us down like rats in the marsh,’ Finan said.
‘So we’ll fight them here,’ I said, and there was little other choice.
We had hurt them. Eohric was dead, Oscytel slaughtered, Beortsig was a corpse and Cnut was wounded, yet Æthelwold lived and Sigurd lived and Haesten lived. I could see them on horseback, pushing men into line, readying their troops to slaughter us.
‘Sigurd!’ I bellowed, and he turned to look for me. ‘I killed your runt of a son!’
‘You’ll die slowly,’ he shouted back.
I wanted to goad him into a wild attack and kill him in front of his men. ‘He squealed like a child when he died!’ I shouted. ‘He squealed like a little coward! Like a puppy!’
Sigurd, his great plaits twisted about his neck, spat towards me. He hated me, he would kill me, but in his own time and in his own way.
‘Keep your shields tight!’ I shouted at my men. ‘Keep them tight and they can’t break us! Show the bastards how Saxons fight!’
Of course they could break us, but you do not tell men about to die that they are about to die. They knew it. Some were shaking in fear, yet they stayed in line. ‘Fight beside me,’ I told Finan.
‘We’ll go together, lord.’
‘Swords in hand.’
Rypere was dead, I had not seen him die, but I saw a Dane hauling the mail from his skinny body. ‘He was a good man,’ I said.
Osferth found us. He was usually so neat, so immaculately dressed, but his mail was torn and his cloak was shredded, and his eyes wild. His helmet had a great dent in its crown, yet he seemed unhurt. ‘Let me fight along with you, lord,’ he said.
‘For ever,’ I told him. Osferth’s cross was still aloft at the centre of our circle, and a priest was calling that God and Saint Lucy would work a miracle, that we would win, that we would live, and I let him preach on because he was saying what men needed to hear.
Jarl Sigurd pushed into the Danish shield wall opposite me. He carried a massive war axe, wide-bladed, and on either side of him were spearmen. Their job was to hold me still while he hacked me to death. I had a new shield, one that showed the crossed swords of Ealdorman Sigelf. ‘Has anyone seen Sigebriht?’ I asked.
‘He’s dead,’ Osferth said.
‘You’re sure?’
‘I killed him, lord.’
I laughed. We had killed so many of the enemy’s leaders, though Sigurd and Æthelwold lived, and they had power enough to crush us and then defeat Edward’s army and so put Æthelwold on Alfred’s throne. ‘Do you remember what Beornnoth said?’ I asked Finan.
‘Should I, lord?’
‘He wanted to know how the story ended,’ I said. ‘I’d like to know that too.’
‘Ours ends here,’ Finan said, and made the sign of the cross with the hilt of his sword.
And the Danes came again.
They came slowly. Men do not want to die at the moment of victory. They want to enjoy the triumph, to share the wealth that winning brings, and so they came steadily, keeping their shields tight-locked.
Someone in our ranks began to sing. It was a Christian song, perhaps a psalm, and most of the men took up the tune, which made me think of my eldest son, and what a bad father I had been, and I wondered if he would be proud of my death. The Danes were beating blades and spear-hafts against their shields. Most of those shields were broken, axe-split, splintered. Men were bloodied, blood of the foemen. Battle in the morning. I was tired, and looking up at the rain clouds, thought this was a bad place to die. But we do not choose our deaths. The Norns do that at the foot of Yggdrasil and I imagined one of those three Fates holding the shears above my thread. She was ready to cut, and all that mattered now was to keep tight hold of my sword so that the winged women would take me to Valhalla’s feasting-hall.
I watched the Danes shouting at us. I did not hear them, not because I was out of earshot, but because the world seemed strangely silent again. A heron came out of the mist and flew overhead and I distinctly heard the heavy beat of its wings, but I did not hear the insults of my enemies. Plant your feet square, overlap the shield, watch the enemy’s blade, be ready to counter-strike. There was pain on my right hip, which I only just noticed. Had I been wounded? I dared not look because the Danes were close and I was watching the two spear tips,
knowing they would strike the right-hand side of my shield to force it back and let Sigurd come from my left. I met Sigurd’s eyes and we stared at each other and then the spears came.
They hurled dozens of spears from their rear ranks, heavy spears arcing over their front ranks to crash hard into our shields. At that moment a man in the front rank must crouch to let the shield protect him, and the Danes charged as they saw us go down. ‘Up!’ I shouted, my shield heavy with two spears. My men were screaming in rage, and the Danes beat into us, shrieking their war cries, hacking with axes, and we pushed back, the two lines locked, heaving. It was a pushing match, but we were only three ranks and the Danes were at least six, and they were driving us back. I tried to skewer Wasp-Sting forward, and her blade struck a shield. Sigurd was trying to reach me, screaming and shouting, but the flow of men forced him away from me. A Dane, open-mouthed and with a beard riddled with blood, hacked an axe at Finan’s shield and I tried to slide Wasp-Sting over my own shield into his face, but another blade deflected mine. We were being forced back, the enemy so close we could smell the ale on their breath. And then the next charge came.
It came from our left, from the south, horsemen crashing up the Roman road with spears levelled and a dragon banner flying. Horsemen from the small mist, horsemen who screamed their challenge as they spurred into the rearward ranks of the enemy. ‘Wessex!’ they shouted, ‘Edward and Wessex!’ I saw the close-packed Danish ranks judder and shift under the impact, and the second rank of the oncoming horsemen had swords that they hacked down at the enemy, and that enemy saw yet more horsemen coming, bright-mailed horsemen in the dawn, and the new flags showed crosses and saints and dragons and the Danes were breaking, running back to the protection of the ditch.
‘Forward!’ I shouted, and I felt the pressure of the Danish attack ease and I bellowed at my men to thrust into them, to kill the bastards, and we screamed like men released from death’s valley as we charged them. Sigurd vanished, protected by his men. I hacked at the bloody-bearded Dane with Wasp-Sting, but the pressure of men swept him off to my right and the Danes ahead were breaking, horsemen among them, swords falling, spears striking, and Steapa was there, huge and angry, snarling at his enemy, using his sword like a butcher’s cleaver, his stallion biting and kicking, wheeling and trampling. I guessed Steapa’s force was small, maybe no more than four or five hundred men, but it had panicked the Danes by attacking their rear ranks, yet it would not be long before they recovered and came back to the assault.