Читать книгу The Last Kingdom Series Books 1-6 - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 19

We gathered at Eoferwic where the pathetic King Egbert was forced to inspect the Danes and wish them well. He rode down the riverbank where the boats waited and where the ragged crews lined on the shore and gazed at him scornfully, knowing he was not a real king, and behind him rode Kjartan and Sven, now part of his Danish bodyguard, though I assumed their job was as much to keep Egbert a prisoner as to keep him alive. Sven, a man now, wore a scarf over his missing eye, and he and his father looked far more prosperous. Kjartan wore mail and had a huge war axe slung on his shoulder, while Sven had a long sword, a coat of fox pelts, and two arm rings. ‘They took part in the massacre at Streonshall,’ Ragnar told me. That was the large nunnery near Eoferwic, and it was evident that the men who had taken their revenge on the nuns had made good plunder.

Kjartan, a dozen rings on his arms, looked Ragnar in the eye. ‘I would still serve you,’ he said, though without the humility of the last time he had asked.

‘I have a new shipmaster,’ Ragnar said, and said no more, and Kjartan and Sven rode on, though Sven gave me the evil sign with his left hand.

The new shipmaster was called Toki, a nickname for Thorbjorn, and he was a splendid sailor and a better warrior who told tales of rowing with the Svear into strange lands where no trees grew except birch and where winter covered the land for months. He claimed the folk there ate their own young, worshipped giants and had a third eye at the back of their heads, and some of us believed his tales.

We rowed south on the last of the summer tides, hugging the coast as we always did and spending the nights ashore on East Anglia’s barren coast. We were going towards the River Temes which Ragnar said would take us deep inland to the northern boundary of Wessex.

Ragnar now commanded the fleet. Ivar the Boneless had returned to the lands he had conquered in Ireland, taking a gift of gold from Ragnar to his eldest son, while Ubba was ravaging Dalriada, the land north of Northumbria. ‘Small pickings up there,’ Ragnar said scornfully, but Ubba, like Ivar, had amassed so much treasure in his invasions of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia that he was not minded to gather more from Wessex, though, as I shall tell you in its proper place, Ubba was to change his mind later and come south.

But for the moment Ivar and Ubba were absent and so the main assault on Wessex would be led by Halfdan, the third brother, who was marching his land army out of East Anglia and would meet us somewhere on the Temes. Ragnar was not happy about the change of command, Halfdan, he muttered, was an impetuous fool, too hotheaded, but he cheered up when he remembered my tales of Alfred which confirmed that Wessex was led by men who put their hopes in the Christian god who had been shown to possess no power at all. We had Odin, we had Thor, we had our ships, we were warriors.

After four days we came to the Temes and rowed against its great current as the river slowly narrowed on us. On the first morning that we came to the river only the northern shore, which was East Anglian territory, was visible, but by midday the southern bank, that used to be the Kingdom of Kent and was now a part of Wessex, was a dim line on the horizon. By evening the banks were a half-mile apart, but there was little to see for the river flowed through flat, dull marshland. We used the tide when we could, blistered our hands on the oars when we could not, and so pulled upstream until, for the very first time, I came to Lundene.

I thought Eoferwic was a city, but Eoferwic was a village compared to Lundene. It was a vast place, thick with smoke from cooking fires, and built where Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex met. Burghred of Mercia was Lundene’s lord, so it was Danish land now, and no one opposed us as we came to the astonishing bridge which stretched so far across the wide Temes.

Lundene. I came to love that place. Not as I love Bebbanburg, but there was a life to Lundene that I found nowhere else, because the city was like nowhere else. Alfred once told me that every wickedness under the sun was practised there, and I am glad to say he was right. He prayed for the place, I revelled in it, and I can still remember gawking at the city’s two hills as Ragnar’s ship ghosted against the current to come close to the bridge. It was a grey day and a spiteful rain was pitting the river, yet to me the city seemed to glow with sorcerous light.

It was really two cities built on two hills. The first, to the east, was the old city that the Romans had made, and it was there that the bridge began its span across the wide river and over the marshes on the southern bank. That first city was a place of stone buildings and had a stone wall, a real wall, not earth and wood, but masonry, high and wide, skirted by a ditch. The ditch had filled with rubbish and the wall was broken in places where it had been patched with timber, but so had the city itself where huge Roman buildings were buttressed by thatched wooden shacks where a few Mercians lived, though most were reluctant to make their homes in the old city. One of their kings had built himself a palace within the stone wall, and a great church, its lower half of masonry and upper parts of wood, had been made atop the hill, but most of the folk, as if fearing the Roman ghosts, lived outside the walls, in a new city of wood and thatch that stretched out to the west.

The old city once had wharves and quays, but they had long rotted so that the waterfront east of the bridge was a treacherous place of rotted pilings and broken piers that stabbed the river like shattered teeth. The new city, like the old, was on the river’s northern bank, but was built on a low hill to the west, a half-mile upstream from the old, and had a shingle beach sloping up to the houses that ran along the riverside road. I have never seen a beach so foul, so stinking of carcasses and shit, so covered in rubbish, so stark with the slimy ribs of abandoned ships and loud with squalling gulls, but that was where our boats had to go and that meant we first had to negotiate the bridge.

The gods alone know how the Romans had built such a thing. A man could walk from one side of Eoferwic to the other and he would still not have walked the length of Lundene’s bridge, though in that year of 871 the bridge was broken and it was no longer possible to walk its full length. Two arches in the centre had long fallen in, though the old Roman piers that had supported the missing roadway were still there and the river foamed treacherously as its water seethed past the broken piers. To make the bridge the Romans had sunk pilings into the Temes’s bed, then into the tangle of foetid marshes on the southern bank, and the pilings were so close together that the water heaped up on their farther side, then fell through the gaps in a glistening rush. To reach the dirty beach by the new city we would have to shoot one of the two gaps, but neither was wide enough to let a ship through with its oars extended. ‘It will be interesting,’ Ragnar said drily.

‘Can we do it?’ I asked.

‘They did it,’ he said, pointing at ships beached upstream of the bridge, ‘so we can.’ We had anchored, waiting for the rest of the fleet to catch up. ‘The Franks,’ Ragnar went on, ‘have been making bridges like this on all their rivers. You know why they do it?’

‘To get across?’ I guessed. It seemed an obvious answer.

‘To stop us getting upriver,’ Ragnar said. ‘If I ruled Lundene I’d repair that bridge, so let’s be grateful the English couldn’t be bothered.’

We shot the gap in the bridge by waiting for the heart of the rising tide. The tide flows strongest halfway between its ebb and the flood, and that brought a surge of water that diminished the flow of the current cascading between the piers. In that short time we might get seven or eight ships through the gap and it was done by rowing at full speed towards the gap and, at the very last minute, raising the oar blades so they would clear the rotted piers, and the momentum of the ship should then carry her through. Not every ship made it on the first try. I watched two slew back, thump against a pier with the crash of breaking blades, then drift back downstream with crews of cursing men, but the Wind-Viper made it, almost coming to a stop just beyond the bridge, but we managed to get the frontmost oars in the water, hauled, and inch by inch we crept away from the sucking gap, then men from two ships anchored upstream managed to cast us lines and they hauled us away from the bridge until suddenly we were in slack water and could row her to the beach.

On the southern bank, beyond the dark marshes, where trees grew on low hills, horsemen watched us. They were West Saxons, and they would be counting ships to estimate the size of the Great Army. That was what Halfdan called it, the Great Army of the Danes come to take all of England, but so far we were anything but great. We would wait in Lundene to let more ships come and for more men to march down the long Roman roads from the north. Wessex could wait awhile as the Danes assembled.

And, as we waited, Brida, Rorik and I explored Lundene. Rorik had been sick again, and Sigrid had been reluctant to let him travel with his father, but Rorik pleaded with his mother to let him go, Ragnar assured her that the sea voyage would mend all the boy’s ills, and so he was here. He was pale, but not sickly, and he was as excited as I was to see the city. Ragnar made me leave my arm rings and Serpent-Breath behind for, he said, the city was full of thieves. We wandered the newer part first, going through malodorous alleys where the houses were full of men working leather, beating at bronze or forging iron. Women sat at looms, a flock of sheep was being slaughtered in a yard, and there were shops selling pottery, salt, live eels, bread, cloth, weapons, any imaginable thing. Church bells set up a hideous clamour at every prayer time or whenever a corpse was carried for burial in the city’s graveyards. Packs of dogs roamed the streets, red kites roosted everywhere, and smoke lay like a fog over the thatch that had all turned a dull black. I saw a wagon so loaded with thatching reed that the wagon itself was hidden by its heap of sagging reeds that scraped on the road and ripped and tore against the buildings on either side of the street as two slaves goaded and whipped the bleeding oxen. Men shouted at the slaves that the load was too big, but they went on whipping, and then a fight broke out when the wagon tore down a great piece of rotted roof. There were beggars everywhere; blind children, women without legs, a man with a weeping ulcer on his cheek. There were folk speaking languages I had never heard, folk in strange costumes who had come across the sea, and in the old city, which we explored the next day, I saw two men with skin the colour of chestnuts and Ravn told me later they came from Blaland, though he was not certain where that was. They wore thick robes, had curved swords, and were talking to a slave dealer whose premises were full of captured English folk who would be shipped to the mysterious Blaland. The dealer called to us. ‘You three belong to anyone?’ He was only half joking.

‘To Earl Ragnar,’ Brida said, ‘who would love to pay you a visit.’

‘Give his lordship my respects,’ the dealer said, then spat, and eyed us as we walked away.

The buildings of the old city were extraordinary. They were Roman work, high and stout, and even though their walls were broken and their roofs had fallen in they still astonished. Some were three or even four floors high and we chased each other up and down their abandoned stairways. Few English folk lived here, though many Danes were now occupying the houses as the army assembled. Brida said that sensible people would not live in a Roman town because of the ghosts that haunted the old buildings, and maybe she was right though I had seen no ghosts in Eoferwic, but her mention of spectres made us all nervous as we peered down a flight of steps into a dark, pillared cellar.

We stayed in Lundene for weeks and even when Halfdan’s army reached us we did not move west. Mounted bands did ride out to forage, but the Great Army still gathered and some men grumbled we were waiting too long, that the West Saxons were being given precious time to ready themselves, but Halfdan insisted on lingering. The West Saxons sometimes rode close to the city, and twice there were fights between our horsemen and their horsemen, but after a while, as Yule approached, the West Saxons must have decided we would do nothing till winter’s end and their patrols stopped coming close to the city.

‘We’re not waiting for spring,’ Ragnar told me, ‘but for deep winter.’

‘Why?’

‘Because no army marches in winter,’ he said wolfishly, ‘so the West Saxons will all be at home, sitting around their fires and praying to their feeble god. By spring, Uhtred, all England will be ours.’

We all worked that early winter. I hauled firewood, and when I was not hauling logs from the wooded hills north of the city, I was learning the skills of the sword. Ragnar had asked Toki, his new shipmaster, to be my teacher and he was a good one. He watched me rehearse the basic cuts, then told me to forget them. ‘In a shield wall,’ he said, ‘it’s savagery that wins. Skill helps, and cunning is good, but savagery wins. Get one of these,’ he held out a sax with a thick blade, much thicker than my old sax. I despised the sax for it was much shorter than Serpent-Breath and far less beautiful, but Toki wore one beside his proper sword, and he persuaded me that in the shield wall the short, stout blade was better. ‘You’ve no room to swing or hack in a shield wall,’ he said, ‘but you can thrust, and a short blade uses less room in a crowded fight. Crouch and stab, bring it up into their groins.’ He made Brida hold a shield and pretend to be the enemy, and then, with me on his left, he cut at her from above and she instinctively raised the shield. ‘Stop!’ he said, and she froze into stillness. ‘See?’ he told me, pointing at the raised shield, ‘your partner makes the enemy raise their shield, then you can slice into their groin.’ He taught me a dozen other moves, and I practised because I liked it and the more I practised the more muscle I grew and the more skilful I became.

We usually practised in the Roman arena. That is what Toki called it, the arena, though what the word meant neither he nor I had any idea, but it was, in a place of extraordinary things, astonishing. Imagine an open space as large as a field surrounded by a great circle of tiered stone where weeds now grew from the crumbling mortar. The Mercians, I later learned, had held their folkmoots here, but Toki said the Romans had used it for displays of fighting in which men died. Maybe that was another of his fantastic stories, but the arena was huge, unimaginably huge, a thing of mystery, the work of giants, dwarfing us, so big that all the Great Army could have collected inside and there would still have been room for two more armies just as big on the tiered seats.

Yule came, and the winter feast was held and the army vomited in the streets and still we did not march, but shortly afterwards the leaders of the Great Army met in the palace next to the arena. Brida and I, as usual, were required to be Ravn’s eyes and he, as usual, told us what we were seeing.

The meeting was held in the church of the palace, a Roman building with a roof shaped like a half-barrel on which the moon and stars were painted, though the blue and golden paint was peeling and discoloured now. A great fire had been lit in the centre of the church and it was filling the high roof with swirling smoke. Halfdan presided from the altar, and around him were the chief Earls. One was an ugly man with a blunt face, a big brown beard and a finger missing from his left hand. ‘That is Bagseg,’ Ravn told us, ‘and he calls himself a king, though he’s no better than anyone else.’ Bagseg, it seemed, had come from Denmark in the summer, bringing eighteen ships and nearly six hundred men. Next to him was a tall, gloomy man with white hair and a twitching face. ‘Earl Sidroc,’ Ravn told us, ‘and his son must be with him?’

‘Thin man,’ Brida said, ‘with a dripping nose.’

‘Earl Sidroc the Younger. He’s always sniffing. My son is there?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘next to a very fat man who keeps whispering to him and grinning.’

‘Harald!’ Ravn said. ‘I wondered if he would turn up. He’s another king.’

‘Really?’ Brida asked.

‘Well, he calls himself king, and he certainly rules over a few muddy fields and a herd of smelly pigs.’

All those men had come from Denmark, and there were others besides. Earl Fraena had brought men from Ireland, and Earl Osbern who had provided the garrison for Lundene while the army gathered, and together these kings and Earls had assembled well over two thousand men.

Osbern and Sidroc proposed crossing the river and striking directly south. This, they argued, would cut Wessex in two and the eastern part, which used to be the Kingdom of Kent, could then be taken quickly. ‘There has to be much treasure in Contwaraburg,’ Sidroc insisted, ‘it’s the central shrine of their religion.’

‘And while we march on their shrine,’ Ragnar said, ‘they will come up behind us. Their power is not in the east, but in the west. Defeat the west and all Wessex falls. We can take Contwaraburg once we’ve beaten the west.’

This was the argument. Either take the easy part of Wessex or else attack their major strongholds that lay to the west, and two merchants were asked to speak. Both men were Danes who had been trading in Readingum only two weeks before. Readingum lay a few miles upriver and was on the edge of Wessex, and they claimed to have heard that King Æthelred and his brother, Alfred, were gathering the shire forces from the west and the two merchants reckoned the enemy army would number at least three thousand.

‘Of whom only three hundred will be proper fighting men,’ Halfdan interjected sarcastically, and was rewarded by the sound of men banging swords or spears against their shields. It was while this noise echoed under the church’s barrel roof that a new group of warriors entered, led by a very tall and very burly man in a black tunic. He looked formidable, clean-shaven, angry and very rich for his black cloak had an enormous brooch of amber mounted in gold, his arms were heavy with golden rings and he wore a golden hammer on a thick golden chain about his neck. The warriors made way for him, his arrival causing silence among the crowd nearest to him, and the silence spread as he walked up the church until the mood, that had been of celebration, suddenly seemed wary.

‘Who is it?’ Ravn whispered to me.

‘Very tall,’ I said, ‘many arm rings.’

‘Gloomy,’ Brida put in, ‘dressed in black.’

‘Ah! The Earl Guthrum,’ Ravn said

‘Guthrum?’

‘Guthrum the Unlucky,’ Ravn said.

‘With all those arm rings?’

‘You could give Guthrum the world,’ Ravn said, ‘and he would still believe you had cheated him.’

‘He has a bone hanging in his hair,’ Brida said.

‘You must ask him about that,’ Ravn said, evidently amused, but he would say no more about the bone, which was evidently a rib and was tipped with gold.

I learned Guthrum the Unlucky was an Earl from Denmark who had been wintering at Beamfleot, a place that lay a good distance east of Lundene on the northern side of the Temes estuary, and once he had greeted the men bunched about the altar he announced that he had brought fourteen ships upriver. No one applauded. Guthrum, who had the saddest, sourest face I had ever seen, stared at the assembly like a man standing trial and expecting a dire verdict. ‘We had decided,’ Ragnar broke the uncomfortable silence, ‘to go west.’ No such decision had been made, but nor did anyone contradict Ragnar. ‘Those ships that are already through the bridge,’ Ragnar went on, ‘will take their crews upstream and the rest of the army will march on foot or horseback.’

‘My ships must go upstream,’ Guthrum said.

‘They are through the bridge?’

‘They will still go upstream,’ Guthrum insisted, thus letting us know that his fleet was below the bridge.

‘It would be better,’ Ragnar said, ‘if we went tomorrow.’ In the last few days the whole of the Great Army had assembled in Lundene, marching in from the settlements east and north where some had been quartered, and the longer we waited, the more of the precious food supply would be consumed.

‘My ships go upstream,’ Guthrum said flatly.

‘He’s worried,’ Ravn whispered to me, ‘that he can’t carry away the plunder on horseback. He wants his ships so he can fill them with treasure.’

‘Why let him come?’ I asked. It was plain no one liked Earl Guthrum, and his arrival seemed as unwelcome as it was inconvenient, but Ravn just shrugged the question off. Guthrum, it seemed, was here, and if he was here he must take part. That still seems incomprehensible to me, just as I still did not understand why Ivar and Ubba were not joining the attack on Wessex. It was true that both men were rich and scarcely needed more riches, but for years they had talked of conquering the West Saxons and now both had simply turned away. Guthrum did not need land or wealth either, but he thought he did, so he came. That was the Danish way. Men served in a campaign if they wished, or else they stayed at home, and there was no single authority among the Danes. Halfdan was the Great Army’s ostensible leader, but he did not frighten men as his two older brothers did and so he could do nothing without the agreement of the other chieftains. An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.

It took two days to get Guthrum’s ships past the bridge. They were beautiful things, those ships, larger than most Danish boats, and each decorated at prow and stern with black painted serpent heads. His men, and there were many of them, all wore black. Even their shields were painted black, and while I thought Guthrum to be one of the most miserable men I had ever seen, I had to confess his troops were impressive. We might have lost two days, but we had gained the black warriors.

And what was there to fear? The Great Army had gathered, it was midwinter when no one fought so the enemy should not be expecting us, and that enemy was led by a king and a prince more interested in prayer than in fighting. All Wessex lay before us and common report said that Wessex was as rich a country as any in all the world, rivalling Frankia for its treasures, and inhabited by monks and nuns whose houses were stuffed with gold, spilling over with silver and ripe for slaughter. We would all be rich.

So we went to war.

Ships on the winter Temes. Ships sliding past brittle reeds and leafless willows and bare alders. Wet oar blades shining in the pale sunlight. The prows of our ships bore their beasts to quell the spirits of the land we invaded, and it was good land with rich fields, though all were deserted. There was almost a celebratory air to that brief voyage, a celebration unspoiled by the presence of Guthrum’s dark ships. Men oar-walked, the same feat I had watched Ragnar perform on that far off day when his three ships had appeared off Bebbanburg. I tried it myself and raised a huge cheer when I fell in. It looked easy to run along the oar bank, leaping from shaft to shaft, but a rower only had to twitch an oar to cause a man to slip and the river water was bitterly cold so that Ragnar made me strip off my wet clothes and wear his bearskin cloak until I was warm. Men sang, the ships forged against the current, the far hills to north and south slowly closed on the river’s banks and, as evening came, we saw the first horsemen on the southern skyline. Watching us.

We reached Readingum at dusk. Each of Ragnar’s three ships was loaded with spades, many of them forged by Ealdwulf, and our first task was to start making a wall. As more ships came, more men helped, and by nightfall our camp was protected by a long, straggling earth wall which would have been hardly any obstacle to an attacking force for it was merely a low mound that was easy to cross, but no one did come and assault us, and no Wessex army appeared next morning and so we were free to make the wall higher and more formidable.

Readingum was built where the River Kenet flows into the Temes, and so our wall was built between the two rivers. It enclosed the small town which had been abandoned by its inhabitants and provided shelter for most of the ships’ crews. The land army was still out of sight for they had marched along the north bank of the Temes, in Mercian territory, and were seeking a ford which they found further upstream so that our wall was virtually finished by the time they marched in. At first we thought it was the West Saxon army coming, but it was Halfdan’s men, marching out of enemy territory which they had found deserted.

The wall was high now, and because there were deep woods to the south, we had cut trees to make a palisade along its whole length that was about eight hundred paces. In front of the wall we dug a ditch that flooded when we broke through the two rivers’ banks, and across the ditch we were making four bridges guarded by wooden forts. This was our base. From here we could march deep into Wessex, and we needed to, for, with so many men and now horses inside the wall, there was a risk of hunger unless we found supplies of grain, hay and cattle. We had brought barrels of ale and a large amount of flour, salt meat and dried fish in the ships, but it was astonishing how fast those great heaps diminished.

The poets, when they speak of war, talk of the shield wall, they talk of the spears and arrows flying, of the blade beating on the shield, of the heroes who fall and the spoils of the victors, but I was to discover that war was really about food. About feeding men and horses. About finding food. The army that eats wins. And, if you keep horses in a fortress, it is about shovelling dung. Just two days after the land army came to Readingum, we were short of food and the two Sidrocs, father and son, led a large force west into enemy territory to find stores of food for men and horses, and instead they found the fyrd of Berrocscire.

We learned later that the whole idea of attacking in winter was no surprise to the West Saxons after all. The Danes were good at spying, their merchants exploring the places the warriors would go, but the West Saxons had their own men in Lundene and they knew how many men we were, and when we would march, and they had assembled an army to meet us. They had also sought help from the men of southern Mercia, where Danish rule was lightest, and Berrocscire lay immediately north of the West Saxon border and the men of Berrocscire had crossed the river to help their neighbours and their fyrd was led by an Ealdorman called Æthelwulf.

Was it my uncle? There were many men called Æthelwulf, but how many were Ealdormen in Mercia? I admit I felt strange when I heard the name, and I thought of the mother I had never met. In my mind she was the woman who was ever kind, ever gentle, ever loving and I thought she must be watching me from somewhere, heaven or Asgard or wherever our souls go in the long darkness, and I knew she would hate that I was with the army that marched against her brother, and so that night I was in a black mood.

But so was the Great Army for my uncle, if Æthelwulf was indeed my uncle, had trounced the two Earls. Their foraging party had walked into an ambush and the men of Berrocscire had killed twenty-one Danes and taken another eight prisoner. The Englishmen had lost a few men themselves, and yielded one prisoner, but they had gained the victory, and it made no difference that the Danes had been outnumbered. The Danes expected to win, and instead they had been chased home without the food we needed. They felt shamed and a shudder went through the army because they did not think mere Englishmen could beat them.

We were not starving yet, but the horses were desperately short of hay which, anyway, was not the best food for them, but we had no oats and so forage parties simply cut whatever winter grass we could find beyond our growing wall and the day after Æthelwulf’s victory Rorik, Brida and I were in one of those groups, slashing at grass with long knives and stuffing sacks with the poor feed, when the army of Wessex came.

They must have been encouraged by Æthelwulf’s victory, for now the whole enemy army attacked Readingum. The first I knew of it was the sound of screaming from farther west, then I saw horsemen galloping among our forage parties, hacking down with swords or skewering men with spears, and the three of us just ran, and I heard the hooves behind and snatched a look and saw a man riding at us with a spear and knew one of us must die and I took Brida’s hand to drag her out of his path and just then an arrow shot from Readingum’s wall slapped into the horseman’s face and he twisted away, blood pouring from his cheek, and meanwhile panicking men were piling around the two central bridges and the West Saxon horsemen, seeing it, galloped towards them. The three of us half waded and half swam the ditch, and two men hauled us, wet, muddy and shivering, up across the wall.

It was chaos outside now. The foragers crowding at the ditch’s far side were being hacked down, and then the Wessex infantry appeared, band after band of them emerging from the far woods to fill the fields. I ran back to the house where Ragnar was lodging and found Serpent-Breath beneath the cloaks where I hid her, and I strapped her on and ran out to find Ragnar. He had gone north, to the bridge close beside the Temes, and Brida and I caught up with his men there. ‘You shouldn’t come,’ I told Brida. ‘Stay with Rorik.’ Rorik was younger than us and, after getting soaked in the ditch he had started shivering and feeling sick and I had made him stay behind.

Brida ignored me. She had equipped herself with a spear and looked excited, though nothing was happening yet. Ragnar was staring over the wall, and more men were assembling at the gate, but Ragnar did not open it to cross the bridge. He did glance back to see how many men he had. ‘Shields!’ he shouted, for, in their haste, some men had come with nothing but swords or axes, and those men now ran to fetch their shields. I had no shield, but nor was I supposed to be there and Ragnar did not see me.

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 practised constantly, and so we never had more than a handful of archers. I never mastered the bow. With a spear, an axe 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 towards 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 centre 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 neighbour’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 centre 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 face-piece 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 armoured in leather.

The enemy was turning outwards to meet us, making their own shield wall, and I saw a group of horsemen galloping up their centre 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 stayed where we were and let them attack us, or that we should have retreated 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 clangour 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 axe fell and there was a gap in the enemy line and 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 than Ragnar’s, for the Englishman’s helmet had a silver boar modelled 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 were 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 brought 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 moustache. 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 armour 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 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 westwards 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 axe 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 which suggested that 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 Earls 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 towards 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 hill crests 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.

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 slaughter-work 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 bið ful ãræd, 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.