The Pale Horseman (42 page)

The army camped that evening to the north of the woods where I had found Æthelwold. He was
in the king's entourage now, and went with Alfred and his war-leaders to the hilltop to
watch the Danish army as it closed on the hills. Alfred looked a long time.

'How far away are they?' he asked.

'From here?' Osric answered. 'Four miles. From your army? Six.'

'Tomorrow, then,' Alfred said, making the sign of the cross. The northern clouds were
spreading, darkening the evening, but the slanting light reflected from spears and axes
at the old people's fort. It seemed Guthrum had not ignored the place after all.

We went back down to the encampment to find yet more men arriving. Not many now, just
small bands, but still they came, and one such band, travel-weary and dusty, was mounted on
horses and all sixteen men had chain mail and good helmets.

They were Mercians and they had ridden far to the east, crossed the Thames, then looped
through Wessex, ever avoiding Danes, and so come to help Alfred. Their leader was a short
young man, wide in the chest, round-faced, and with a pugnacious expression.

He knelt to Alfred, then grinned at me, and I recognised my cousin, Ethelred.

My mother was a Mercian, though I never knew her, and her brother Ethelred was a power
in the southern part of that country and I had spent a short time in his hall when I first
fled from Northumbria. Back then I had quarrelled with my cousin, called Ethelred like his
father, but he seemed to have forgotten our youthful enmity and embraced me instead.
The top of his head just came up to my collar-bone.

'We've come to fight,' he told me, his voice muffled by my chest.

'You'll have a fight,' I promised him.

'Lord,' he let go of me and turned back to Alfred, 'my father would have sent more men,
but he must protect his land.'

'He must,' Alfred said.

'But he sent the best he has,' Ethelred went on. He was young and bumptious, a little
strut of a youth, but his confidence pleased Alfred, as did the gleaming silver crucifix
hanging over Ethelred's chain mail. 'Allow me to present Tatwine,' my cousin went on, 'the
chief of my father's household troops.'

I remembered Tatwine, a barrel of a man and a real fighter, whose arms were smothered
in blotchy black marks, each made with a needle and ink and representing a man killed in
battle, He gave me a crooked smile. 'Still alive, lord?'

'Still alive, Tatwine.'

'Be good to fight alongside you again.'

Good to have you here,' I said, and it was. Few men are natural-born warriors, and a man
like Tatwine was worth a dozen others.

Alfred had ordered the army to assemble again. He did it partly so the men could see
their own numbers and take heart from that, and he did it, too, because he knew his speech
the previous night had left men confused and uninspired. He would try again.

'I wish he wouldn't,' Leofric grumbled. 'He can make sermons, but he can't make
speeches.'

We gathered at the foot of a small hill. The light was fading. Alfred had planted his
two banners, the dragon and the cross, on the summit of the hill, but there was a small wind
so the flags stirred rather than flew. He climbed to stand between them. He was alone, dressed
in a mail coat over which he wore the faded blue cloak. A group of priests began to follow
him, but he waved them back to the hill's foot, then be just stared at us huddled in the
meadow beneath him and for a time he said nothing and I sensed the discomfort in the
ranks. They wanted fire put into their souls and expected holy water instead.

'Tomorrow!' he said suddenly. His voice was high, but it carried clearly enough.
'Tomorrow we fight!

Tomorrow! The Feast of St John the Apostle!'

'Oh God,' Leofric grumbled next to me, 'up to our arsholes in more saints.'

'John the Apostle was condemned to death!' Alfred said, 'he was condemned to be boiled
in oil! Yet he survived the ordeal! He was plunged into the boiling oil and he lived! He
came from the cauldron a stronger man! And we shall do the same.' He paused, watching us, and
no one responded, we all just gazed at him, and he must have known that his homily on Saint
John was not working for he made an abrupt gesture with his right hand as if he were
sweeping all the saints aside. 'And tomorrow,' he went on, 'is also a day for warriors. A
day to kill your enemies. A day to make the pagans wish they had never heard of
Wessex!'

He paused again, and this time there were some murmurs of agreement.

'This is our land! We fight for our homes! For our wives! For our children! We fight for
Wessex!'

'We do,' someone shouted.

'And not just Wessex!' Alfred's voice was stronger now. 'We have men from Mercia, men
from Northumbria, men from East Anglia!' I knew of none from East Anglia and only Beocca
and I were from Northumbria, but no one seemed to care.

'We are the men of England,' Alfred shouted, 'and we fight for all Saxons.'

Silence again. The men liked what they heard, but the idea of England was in Alfred's
head, not theirs. He had a dream of one country, but it was too big a dream for the army in
the meadow.

'And why are the Danes here?' Alfred asked. 'They want your wives for their pleasure, your
children for their slaves and your homes for their own, but they do not know us!' He said the
last six words slowly, spacing them out, shouting each one distinctly. They do not know
our swords,' he went on,

'they do not know our axes, our spears, our fierceness! Tomorrow we teach them!
Tomorrow we kill them! Tomorrow we hack them into pieces! Tomorrow we make the ground
red with their blood and make them whimper! Tomorrow we shall make them call for our
mercy!'

'None!' a man called out.

‘No mercy!' Alfred shouted, and I knew he did not mean it. He would have offered every
mercy to the Danes, he would have offered them the love of God and tried to reason with
them, but in the last few minutes he had at last learned how to talk to warriors.

'Tomorrow,' he shouted, 'you do not fight for me! I fight for you! I fight for Wessex! I
fight for your wives, for your children and your homes! Tomorrow we fight and, I swear to
you on my father's grave and on my children's lives, tomorrow we shall win!'

And that started the cheering. It was not, in all honesty, a great battle speech, but it
was the best Alfred ever gave and it worked. Men stamped the ground and those who carried
their shields heat them with swords or spears so that the twilight was filled with a rhythmic
thumping as men shouted, 'No mercy!' The sound echoed back from the hills. 'No mercy, no
mercy.'

We were ready. And the Danes were ready.

That night it clouded over. The stars vanished one by one, and the thin moon was
swallowed in the darkness. Sleep came hard.

I sat with Iseult who was cleaning my mail while I sharpened both swords.

'You will win tomorrow,' Iseult said in a small voice.

'You dreamed that?'

She shook her head. 'The dreams don't come since I was baptised.'

'So you made it up?'

'I have to believe it,' she said.

The stone scraped down the blades. All around me other men were sharpening weapons.

'When this is over,' I said, 'you and I will go away. We shall make a house.'

'When this is over,' she said, 'you will go north. Ever north. Back to your home.'

'Then you'll come with me.'

'Perhaps.' She heaved the mail coat to start on a new patch, scrubbing it with a scrap of
fleece to make the links shine. 'I can't see my own future. It's all dark.'

'You shall be the lady of Bebbanburg,' I said, 'and I shall dress you in furs and crown
you with bright silver.'

She smiled, but I saw there were tears on her face. I took it for fear. There was plenty of
that in the camp that night, especially when men noticed the glow of light showing where
the Danes had lit their fires in the nearby hills. We did sleep, but I was woken long before
dawn by a small rain. No one slept through it, but all stirred and pulled on war gear.

We marched in the grey light. The rain came and went, spiteful and sharp, but always at
our backs. Most of us walked, using our few horses to carry shields. Osric and his men went
first, for they knew the shire. Alfred had said that the men of Wiltunscir would be on the
right of the battle line, and with them would be the men of Suth Seaxa. Alfred was next,
leading his bodyguard that was made of all the men who had come to him in Æthelingaeg, and
with him was Harald and the men of Defnascir and Thornsaeta. Burgweard and the men from
Hamptonscir would also fight with Alfred, as would my cousin Ethelred from Mercia, while
on the left would be the strong fyrd of Sumorsaete under Wiglaf. Three and a half thousand
men. The women came with us. Some carried their men's weapons, others had their own.

No one spoke much. It was cold that morning, and the rain made the grass slippery. Men
were hungry and tired. We were all fearful.

Alfred had told me to collect fifty or so men to lead, but Leofric was unwilling to
lose that many from his ranks, so I took them from Burgweard instead. I took the men who had
fought with me in the Heahengel when she had been the Fyrdraca, and twenty-six of those
men had come from Hamtun. Steapa was with us, for he had taken a perverse liking to me,
and I had Father Pyrlig, who was dressed as a warrior, not a priest. We were fewer than
thirty men, but as we climbed past a green-mounded grave of the old folk, Æthelwold came to
us. 'Alfred said I could fight with you,' he said.

'He said that?'

'He said I'm not to leave your side.'

I smiled at that. If I wanted a man by my side it would be Eadric or Cenwulf, Steapa or
Pyrlig, men I could trust to keep their shields firm. 'You're not to leave my back,' I said to
Æthelwold.

'Your back?'

'And in the shield wall you stay close behind me. Ready to take my place.'

He took that as an insult, 'I want to be in the front,' he insisted.

'Have you ever fought in a shield wall?'

'You know I haven't.'

'Then you don't want to be in the front,' I said, 'and besides, if Alfred dies, who'll be
king?'

'Ah.' He half smiled. 'So I stay behind you?'

'You stay behind me.'

Iseult and Hild were leading my horse. 'If we lose,' I told them, 'you both get in the
saddle and ride.'

'Ride where?'

'Just ride. Take the money,' I said. My silver and treasures, all I possessed, were in
the horse's saddlebags, 'take it and ride with Hild.'

Hild smiled at that. She looked pale and her fair hair was plastered tight to her scalp by
the rain. She had no hat, and was dressed in a white shift belted with rope. I was surprised
that she had come with the army, thinking she would have preferred to find a convent, but
she had insisted on coming.

'I want to see them dead,' she told me flatly. 'And the one called Erik I want to kill
myself.' She patted the long, narrow-bladed knife hanging from her belt.

'Erik is the one who ...' I began, then hesitated.

'The one who whored me,' she said.

'So he wasn't the one we killed that night?'

She shook her head. 'That was the steersman of Erik's ship. But I'll find Erik, and I won't
go back to a convent till I see him screaming in his own blood.'

'Full of hate, she is,' Father Pyrlig told me as we followed Hild and Iseult up the
hill.

'Isn't that bad in a Christian?'

Pyrlig laughed. 'Being alive is bad in a Christian. We say a person is a saint if they're
good, but how few of us become saints? We're all bad! Some of us just try to be good.'

I glanced at Hild. 'She's wasted as a nun,' I said.

'You do like them thin, don't you?' Pyrlig said, amused. 'Now I like them meaty as well-fed
heifers!

Give me a nice dark Briton with hips like a pair of ale barrels and I'm a happy priest.
Poor Hild. Thin as a ray of sunlight, she is, but I pity a Dane who crosses her path
today.'

Osric's scouts came back to Alfred. They had ridden ahead and seen the Danes. The enemy
was waiting, they reported, at the edge of the escarpment, where the hills were highest
and where the old people's fort stood. Their banners, the scouts said, were numberless.
They had also seen Danish scouts, so Guthrum and Svein must have known we were coming.

On we went, ever higher, climbing into the chalk downs, and the rain stopped, but no sun
appeared for the whole sky was a turmoil of grey and black. The wind gusted from the west.
We passed whole rows of graves from the ancient days and I wondered if they contained
warriors who had gone to battle as we did, and I wondered if in the thousands of years to
come other men would toil up these hills with swords and shields. Of warfare there is no end,
and I looked into the dark sky for a sign from Thor or Odin, hoping to see a raven fly, but
there were no birds. Just clouds.

And then I saw Osric's men slanting away to the right. We were in a fold of the hills and
they were going around the right-hand hill and, as we reached the saddle between the two
low slopes, I saw the level ground and there, ahead of me, was the enemy.

I love the Danes. There are no better men to fight with, drink with, laugh with or live
with. Yet that day, as on so many others of my life, they were the enemy and they waited for
me in a gigantic shield wall arrayed across the down. There were thousands of Danes,
Spear-Danes and Sword-Danes, Danes who had come to make this land theirs, and we had come to
keep it ours.

'God give us strength,' Father Pyrlig said when he saw the enemy who had begun shouting
as we appeared. They clashed spears and swords against limewood shields, making a thunder
on the hilltop. The ancient fort was the right wing of their army, and men were thick on the
green turf walls. Many of those men had black shields and above them was a black banner, so
that was where Guthrum was, while their left wing, which faced our right, was strung out on the
open down and it was there I could see a triangular banner, supported by a small
cross-staff, showing a white horse. So Svein commanded their left, while to the Danish
right, our left, the escarpment dropped to the river plains. It was a steep drop, a
tumbling hill. We could not hope to outflank the Danes on that side, for no one could fight
on such a slope. We had to attack straight ahead, directly into the shield wall and against
the earthen ramparts and onto the spears and the swords and the war axes of our
outnumbering enemy.