Death of Kings (43 page)

And from behind me, from beside the houses close to the river, the thunder began. The Danes were clashing their spears and swords against their shields, making the war-thunder, the noise to weaken a man’s heart, and it was time to dismount and take my place in the shield wall.

The shield wall.

It terrifies, there is no place more terrible than the shield wall. It is the place where we die and where we conquer and where we make our reputation. I touched Thor’s hammer, prayed that Edward was coming, and readied to fight.

In the shield wall.

I knew the Danes would try to get behind us, but that would take time. They needed to either skirt the marshland or find a way across the swamp, and neither could be done in less than an hour, probably two. I had a messenger back down the road with orders to find Edward and urge haste on him, because his troops were the only ones who could block a Danish encirclement. And if the Danes did try to surround us, they would also want to pin me in place, which meant I could expect a frontal attack to keep me busy while part of their forces looked for a way to reach our rear.

And if Edward did not come?

Then this was where I would die, where Ælfadell’s prophecy would come true, where some man would claim the boast that he had killed Uhtred.

The Danes advanced slowly. Men do not relish the shield wall. They do not rush to death’s embrace. You look ahead and see the overlapping shields, the helmets, the glint of axes and spears and swords, and you know you must go into the reach of those blades, into the place of death, and it takes time to summon the courage, to heat the blood, to let the madness overtake caution. That is why men drink before battle. My own men had no ale or mead, though the Centish forces had enough and I could see the Danes passing skins down their line. They were still beating their weapons on their willow shields and the day was lightening to cast long shadows across the frost. I had seen horsemen go east and knew they were looking for a way around my flank, but I could not worry about those men for I did have enough troops to counter them. I had to hold the Danes in front till Edward came to kill those behind.

Priests were walking down our line. Men knelt to them and the priests blessed them and put pinches of mud on their tongues. ‘This is Saint Lucy’s Day,’ one priest called to the shield-warriors, ‘and she will blind the enemy! She will protect us! Blessed Saint Lucy! Pray to Saint Lucy!’

The rain had stopped, though much of the winter sky was still shrouded by cloud beneath which the enemy banners were bright. Sigurd’s flying raven and Cnut’s shattered cross, Æthelwold’s stag and Beortsig’s boar, Haesten’s skull and Eohric’s weird beast. There were lesser jarls among the enemy ranks and they had their own symbols; wolves and axes and bulls and hawks. Their men shouted insults and beat their weapons on their shields, and slowly they came forward, a few steps at a time. The Saxons and East Anglians of the enemy army were being encouraged by their priests, while the Danes were calling on Thor or Odin. My men were mostly silent, though I suppose they made jokes to cover their fear. Hearts were beating faster, bladders emptying, muscles shaking. This was the shield wall.

‘Remember!’ the Centish priest shouted, ‘that Saint Lucy was so filled with the Holy Spirit that twenty men could not move her! They harnessed a team of oxen to her and still she could not be moved! That is how you must be when the pagans come! Immovable! Filled by the Spirit! Fight for Saint Lucy!’

The men who had gone eastwards had vanished in a morning mist that seeped from the marshes. There were so many of the enemy, a horde, a killing horde, and they came closer still, a hundred paces, and horsemen galloped in front of their tightknit shield wall and called encouragement. One of those horsemen slewed towards us. He wore bright mail, thick arm rings and a glittering helmet, and his horse was a magnificent beast, newly groomed and oiled, its harness bright with silver. ‘You’re going to die!’ he shouted at us.

‘If you want to fart,’ I shouted back, ‘go to your own side and stink them out.’

‘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.