Born of the Sun (43 page)

“But my men are experienced,” Ceawlin replied. “Bertred, give the order to march.”

Ceawlin’s men all knew how to move quickly. They crossed the sodden countryside, marching along miry lanes with a speed that took Aethelbert, whose men, hunched against the weather, had slogged along at a snail’s pace, by surprise in the fields just outside of Odinham. Aethelbert, who had given the order for his men to camp for the night, thinking that Ceawlin was still within the confines of Winchester, was stunned when he realized that the king was upon him. It was growing dark by now and the two armies, camped on opposite sides of a dreary mud-filled beanfield, settled in for the night and made preparations to fight on the morrow.

The West Saxons were outnumbered by almost three to one. “We have experience on our side,” Ceawlin said to his eorls as they took shelter from the rain under a hastily rigged tent. “The East Anglians are not tried in the kind of battle we will see tomorrow. We must carry the day early. The longer it goes on, the more will their numbers tell against us.”

The following day was the feast of Eostre and the dawn rose gray and bitter. The rain had not ceased to fall all through the night, and the wind was blowing it into the faces of the men of Wessex as they formed up in battle order. Ceawlin had given the right wing to Bertred, the left to Ine, and the center to Cutha. He himself was commanding a flying wing of twenty men, ready to reinforce whatever line should need him most. The rain poured down and the men waited for the enemy on the other side of the field to make the first move.

“My lord!” The shout came from one of the men in Ceawlin’s wing. “Listen!” Then they all heard it, the sound of horses’ hooves coming fast. Out of the murk they swirled, a troop of horses mired in mud from the furious ride. It was Gereint, and with him were thirty men.

“There are more coming,” Gereint said to Ceawlin breathlessly. “But they are on foot.”

Ceawlin grinned and threw an arm across Gereint’s shoulders. “By all the gods, but it is good to see you!” He looked around him, to Bertred and Ine. “Now that the old fellowship is together again, how can we lose?”

Just then the wind began to shift, driving the rain full into the faces of the men from East Anglia. “Use your arrows first!” Ceawlin shouted, then hastily sent the horses to the rear and deployed Gereint and his men in the center with Cutha.

There was a shout from the far side of the field and then the East Anglians were coming on. Ceawlin’s archers delivered a volley into the oncoming enemy mass. Aethelbert’s archers replied, but they were half-blinded by the heavy rain and most of their arrows fell short. Once again Ceawlin’s archers shot into the close-packed mass of oncoming thanes. The East Anglians, infuriated by their vulnerability, flung themselves upon the enemy host.

Ceawlin’s line gave way a little under the weight of the numbers. Up and down the field men hacked and thrust at each other with sword, spear, and battleax. Cutha bore the brunt of it in the center, slashing at the masses of the enemy like a madman until he saw that his line had steadied.

Ine’s line on the left was the first to waver and Ceawlin took his detachment of men and plowed into the battle line, laying about him furiously, a silver-haired instrument of destruction and death. When the line stiffened, he withdrew to lead his detachment to another weak spot.

Slowly, as the deadly minutes passed, the numbers of the East Anglians began to tell. Foot by foot, the West Saxons yielded ground. Tirelessly Ceawlin, the most awesome warrior on all the field, hurled himself into gaps in the line to beat down the enemy advance and cheer the hearts of his men. But still his line was being forced back.

Sigurd heard the fight before he actually saw it. The West Saxon line had been forced back almost to the edge of the field when out of the rain the forces from Wyckholm appeared. With a shout they fell upon the right flank of the East Anglians. Ceawlin, seeing the shock of Sigurd’s assault, stormed to the front of his own center and rallied his men. The West Saxons, given new heart by the impact of fresh troops, drove forward again. Fighting like maddened dogs, the men of Wessex thrust at the East Anglian line, and it gave. Back and back it went, and then it broke. All of a sudden the East Anglians were in retreat, fleeing toward their horses on the far side of the field.

Ceawlin called his men back, refusing to allow a pursuit that might cost him lives he could ill afford to lose. Then he set about burying his dead. A mile away, on a soaked and muddy cornfield, Aethelbert gathered his men together to lick their wounds. Ceawlin waited until darkness had fallen, then circled around Aethelbert’s army and went east, to cut off the East Anglians’ access to Kent.

“Hammer of Thor, but I was glad to see you!” Ceawlin draped his arm across Sigurd’s shoulder as the two of them walked from the cook fire to their sleeping places. It had been full light for some hours; Ceawlin had gotten his army to the ford near Oswald’s manor of Gildham, the place where he had decided to make his next stand against Aethelbert. He had not allowed his tired men to stop for even a few hours to rest, so insistent was he on reaching his destination.

“I went first to Silchester,” Sigurd said. “It was a good thing you thought to send a man to the city with messages.”

“I sent him for Gereint. I did not know you would be coming.” Ceawlin’s hand tightened momentarily. “I might have known you would not fail me.”

“We repulsed Aethelbert from Wyckholm too easily. He saw he could not take it and so he went on.” Ceawlin could feel Sigurd’s shoulders move in a shrug. “We should have dissembled our strength.”

“What you did was better.” Ceawlin grinned, his teeth showing very white in his dirty face. “Now we are between Aethelbert and Kent and I anticipate reinforcements from Cuthwulf momentarily. Things could not be better, Sigurd. And it is thanks to your timely rescue, my friend.”

Ceawlin was always generous in sharing credit. It was one of the things that made him so popular with his men. “What would you have done had I not arrived?” Sigurd asked curiously.

“I told the eorls beforehand that if I called a retreat they were to take their men and run like hounds out of hell for the gates of Odinham manor. Ine had sent earlier to make sure they would be opened for us. But if we had to do that, we would leave free passage for Aethelbert to head for Kent.” Ceawlin ran a hand through his filthy hair. “This is much better,” he said with satisfaction. “Now the command of the war has passed to me.”

The men of Ceawlin’s war band slept soundly on the cold and muddy ground near Gild Ford and waited for news from Kent. It came the following afternoon, with the arrival of Cuthwulf and his war band of nearly two hundred: his own thanes and the thanes Ceawlin had given him from Winchester. Sigurd took one look at his brother’s exuberant face and knew that Cuthwulf had been successful.

“It was a war band, all right,” Cuthwulf told Ceawlin and the rest of the eorls as they sat around a fire trying to keep warm. “The leaders were Aethelbert’s kinsmen, Oslaf and Cnebba. They had rounded up a huge herd of cattle by the time I came up with them at Wibbandun.” Cuthwulf’s teeth flashed in the darkness of his beard. “We beat them into the ground,” he boasted. “The two eorls are dead along with half of their men. The rest of them went running back to Kent.”

“A good job, Cuthwulf,” said Ceawlin. “Well done.” Then, “What have you done with the cattle?”

A furtive look passed over Cuthwulf’s face. “Oh,” he said, and waved his hand, “we disposed of them.”

“How?” said the king.

Cuthwulf’s jaw jutted forward. “I left them under the guard of some of my men.”

“They must be returned to their original owners.”

“Those cattle are mine!” said Cuthwulf. “My booty. I promised them to my men.”

“They are not yours, either to keep or to promise. Those cattle belong to the vils and farms from which they were stolen by the Kentmen. And you will return them.”

Cuthwulf glared at Ceawlin. The king’s eyes were as brilliant a turquoise as Sigurd had ever seen them. “Cuthwulf,” said Sigurd quietly, “Ceawlin is right. If the cattle had come from Kent, then they would be booty. But they belong to West Saxons, to our own people.”

“What about the cattle that belong to the Britons?” said Cuthwulf to Ceawlin.

“The Britons who live in Wessex are my subjects too. You will return all the cattle.”

Cuthwulf cursed, got to his feet, and left the fire.

“You should have waited,” Cutha said to Ceawlin in the sudden silence. “He has done you a great service, Ceawlin. You might have given him a chance to relish his victory.”

Ceawlin’s eyes still glittered. “I told him,” he said to Cutha, and his voice was cold. “I told him before ever I sent him east that the cattle were not his. He knew. He had no right to promise them to his men.” The silence around the fire was heavy. Then Cutha got to his feet and left to join his son. Sigurd put his head into his hands and stared at the ground.

Aethelbert awoke the morning after the Battle of Odinham to discover that Ceawlin had gone. Edric was grim-faced and dour when told the news, but Aethelbert perceived it differently from his brother-by-marriage. “He did not wish to meet me again,” he declared. “It was only luck that Sigurd came up at the last moment like that. It took the heart from our thanes. They did not know how many more fresh assaults they would have to withstand.”

“It certainly took the heart from our troops, my lord,” said Edric. “But I doubt if Ceawlin’s departure has aught to do with fear.”

“His victory was merely luck,” Aethelbert repeated. “The rain was in our faces and then his men came up just in time.”

The rest of the East Anglian eorls seconded their king. Edric looked bleakly over the field where men were at work burning the East Anglian dead. The fools, he thought. Ceawlin had beaten them. They had been three men to every one of his, and he had beaten them. And now he had gone to cut off their chance of joining up with the forces from Kent.

“In fact,” said Aethelbert with sudden passion,
“we
are the ones left holding the field. By all the laws of battle, we may claim the victory.”

It was pointless to argue, Edric thought. Nothing he said would alter Aethelbert’s vision of himself as a great warrior. He could only hope that Oslaf and Cnebba had been successful against whoever it was that Ceawlin had sent to deal with them. That Ceawlin had sent someone, he had no doubt. He had fought against Cynric’s son for so long that he thought he probably knew Ceawlin’s mind better than any one of Ceawlin’s own eorls.

“We will march for Kent tomorrow, when we have given honor to our dead,” said Aethelbert. “Once we have joined forces with my kinsmen, there will not be luck enough in the world to enable Ceawlin to withstand us.”

It took Aethelbert’s war band two days to cover the twenty miles that Ceawlin had covered in one night. When they were five miles distant they learned that Ceawlin was awaiting them at Gild Ford. Then they learned of the defeat of Oslaf and Cnebba.

“We must fight,” Edric said as the East Anglian eorls took council together. “If we turn back, he will only follow. And Penda bars the way back to East Anglia.” He looked around the circle of gloomy faces. “The odds are even, my lords. He does not have advantage of us that way.”

“We could not defeat them when we outnumbered them,” one of the eorls said heavily. “How are we to beat them now?”

The myth of an East Anglian victory at Odinham could not weather the reality of Ceawlin and four hundred West Saxons staring them in the face.

“They had luck on their side last time,” Edric said. He infused his voice with as much confidence as he could muster. “Come, my lords! Is East Anglia to be frightened by a battle against equal odds?”

“Of course not!” said Aethelbert, his passionate heart stirred by Edric’s words.

The rest of the eorls agreed, although with noticeably less enthusiasm.

The Battle of Gild Ford was fought the following day and was a rout for the East Anglians. Aethelbert’s men crumbled under the weight of the West Saxon charge. After less than ten minutes the East Anglian lines had broken up into swarms of fleeing thanes. Ceawlin gave the order to pursue, and slaughter was done as the West Saxons mercilessly cut down the fleeing East Anglians. By day’s end the fields around Gild Ford were heaped with the slain.

When night fell, Aethelbert, who had got away on horseback, was safely in Kent. But the army he had brought so proudly from East Anglia lay in bloody ruins on the soil of Wessex. The king returned to Sutton Hoo, a reluctant herald of disaster. Not only did he have to tell his sister that her hopes of winning a throne for her son had perished at Gild Ford; he had also to tell her that Edric, her husband, was dead.

Ceawlin returned to Winchester with his eorls and his thanes after sending a messenger north to tell Penda that the threat from East Anglia was over. Word had gone before them of the king’s victory, and most of the population of Winchester-Venta lined the road to welcome their defenders.

Sigurd rode with his father, one on either side of the gold-helmeted king. Cuthwulf had not accompanied the army back to Winchester; directly after the battle he had taken his men and returned to Banford, which manor he held for his father while Cutha remained in his hall at Winchester. When first Sigurd had learned that Ceawlin meant to give Cuthwulf command of the expedition to Kent, he had been pleased. His brother’s growing discontent had been an increasing worry to him, and such a command was certain to placate Cuthwulf’s pride. Now he was not so sure that Ceawlin’s choice of Cuthwulf had been the honor Sigurd had originally deemed it. He was afraid rather that Ceawlin had bestowed it as a final test of Cuthwulf’s allegiance; and he feared further that it was a test that Cuthwulf had failed.

Edith welcomed her husband with such heartfelt thanksgiving that Sigurd felt ashamed he had thought of her so little. The twins came running to fling their little arms around his legs, and his heart swelled with love as he stooped to encircle their sturdy little bodies with his arms. His love for his children was spontaneous, unshadowed—the only love he knew, he sometimes thought, that was untainted by guilt.