The Flame Bearer (The Last Kingdom Series, Book 10) (33 page)

They raced past me, led by my son. ‘Young legs,’ I said to Finan, and just then the bell in the church tower began to sound. I could see the huge instrument swinging and see that the bell-rope was being pulled frantically because the bell was jerking wildly as it swung. The sound was harsh, loud, and panicked.

‘Now they’re awake,’ Finan said drily.

The bell had woken the Scots too, at least those who had not already crowded onto the dunes to watch the ships approach. I could see men and women coming from the cottages on the harbour’s far side to gather on the shore. Domnall would be wondering what caused the alarm, he would also be considering whether this was the moment to assault the Low Gate. My cousin would be wondering the same thing, and his fear of a Scottish attack would convince him to leave a strong force to guard the southern ramparts. Constantin, I thought with grim amusement, would not be happy if he knew how his men were making things easier for us. ‘Hoist the banner,’ I told Rorik. It was the same banner that flew above the great hall, the wolf’s head banner of Bebbanburg.

I had taken a swift glance behind before following the younger men towards the great hall. The harbour channel was now blocked by my four ships, by Æthelhelm’s four, by the
Trianaid
, and by Einar’s vessels. Some of Æthelhelm’s men had fled onto the northern beach and were being pursued by Norsemen, while others were waging a bitter battle on the ships’ decks, but most of the fighting seemed to be on the beach immediately below the Sea Gate, which hid my view. I could see that Gerbruht and his men were merely watching the struggle, which told me that neither the West Saxons nor, so far, the Scots or Norsemen were attacking the gate. So my enemies fought each other, and the thought of that made me laugh aloud. ‘What’s funny?’ Finan asked.

‘I love it when our enemies fight each other.’

Finan chuckled. ‘I almost feel sorry for Æthelhelm’s boys. To come all this way to have a crew of furious Scotsmen up their arses? Welcome to Northumbria.’

Ahead of us was a rising stretch of bare rock, where, in my father’s time, men had practised their battle skills and, on sunny days, women had laid clothing to dry. At the far end of the rocky stretch were storehouses, barracks, and stables, and on the right reared the crag of steeper rock where the hall and church were built. Those buildings were also approached by a crude stone ramp that followed the curve of the landward ramparts, and my son was leading our men up that ramp, which, in places, had been cut into steps. They went fast. I watched as the first of my warriors ran past the church and through a side door into the great hall. Almost immediately some women and children fled the hall through the bigger doors that faced the sea and overlooked the storehouses. They ran down the steep stairs, joined by some of my cousin’s warriors, who, it seemed, were not inclined to fight for the crag’s flat summit. Finan and I hurried, climbing a steep flight of wide stone stairs that led from the ramp to the church. The bell was still tolling, and I half thought of going into the stone building, finding whoever hauled on the bell-rope, and silencing the noise, but then decided the frantic sound was spreading panic, and panic was my friend in this late afternoon. A woman screamed from the church door when she saw us. I ignored her, following my warriors into the gloom of the hall. ‘Uhtred!’ I bellowed in search of my son.

‘Father?’

‘The front of the hall! Form a shield wall in front!’

He shouted orders and men followed him into the sunlight. There were four bodies among the tables on the hall’s stone floor, the corpses of men caught inside and foolish enough to have offered a fight. A fire smouldered in the big central hearth, and oatcakes were baking on the ring of stones that bordered the fire. I climbed onto the dais and pushed open a door that led to a windowless chamber. There was no one in the room, which, I guessed, was where my cousin slept. There was a bed covered in furs, a tapestry on one wall, and three wooden chests. Their contents must wait. I went back into the hall, jumped from the dais and turned fast when I heard a snarl from my right, but it was only a hound-bitch under a table. She was protecting her puppies. My puppies now, I thought, and remembered days hunting in the hills behind the harbour, and suddenly it seemed as if the past unravelled and I could hear my father’s voice echoing in the hall. It did not matter that the heavy rafters were twice as far overhead as they had been in his day, nor that the hall was longer and wider. This was Bebbanburg! It was home! ‘Get a proper spear, you louse,’ my father had snarled on the last day we had hunted boar together. Gytha, his new wife and my stepmother, had protested that a man’s spear was too heavy for a nine-year-old. ‘Then let him be gutted by a boar,’ my father had said, ‘it will do the world a favour and rid us of a louse.’ My uncle had laughed. I should have heard the envy and hatred in that laugh, but now, a lifetime later, I had come to undo the wrong that my uncle had done.

I went through the big sea-facing door to find my men arrayed on the flat space beyond. We had captured Bebbanburg’s summit, but that did not mean we had won the fortress. We still had to scour the rock of enemies, and they were gathering beneath us. Immediately below us, and reached by the steps down which the women and children had fled, was the wide patch of scorched stone, shadowed now by the great hall’s gable and littered with charred beams which I supposed had been the granary that had burned. Beyond that were other storehouses or barracks, some with scorched walls, and my cousin’s men, now properly armed with mail and shields, were filling the alleys between them.

And I realised I had made a mistake. I had thought that by capturing the great hall, the highest point of Bebbanburg, I would force my cousin’s men to attack us, and men attacking up steep steps would die under our blades. But the men gathering in the alleys showed no sign of wanting to be killed. They waited, expecting us to attack, and I suddenly realised that if my cousin had the sense of a flea he would leave us on the summit while he recaptured the Sea Gate and admitted Æthelhelm’s men. We had to dislodge my cousin’s gathering forces, defeat them, and drive them out of Bebbanburg before he understood the opportunity, and the only way to do that was to go down into the tangle of smaller buildings and hunt them down. And I still did not know how many men my cousin led, though I did know that the sooner we started killing them then the sooner I could again call Bebbanburg home.

‘Uhtred!’ I shouted for my son, ‘You’ll stay here with twenty men. Watch our backs! The rest of you! Follow me!’ I ran down the steps which were the great hall’s main approach, and which led to the burned-out granary. ‘Make a wall!’ I shouted when I reached the foot of the stairs. ‘A wall! Finan! Go left!’

Two alleyways faced us, both filling with enemies. Those enemies were still confused. They had not been expecting a fight on this summer’s afternoon, and a man needs time to ready himself for the prospect of death. I could see they were nervous. They were not shouting insults, nor moving threateningly forward, but waiting behind their shields. I would not give them time. ‘Now forward!’

And what did my cousin’s men see? They saw confident warriors. By now they knew we were the dreaded enemy, the threat that had loomed over Bebbanburg for so many years. They saw warriors who came to the fight eagerly, and they knew what my men had achieved across the years. In all Britain there were few bands of warriors as experienced as my men, who had a reputation as feral as my men, who were feared as much as my men. I sometimes called them my wolf pack, and the defenders who waited in the alleys feared they were about to be ripped apart with the savagery of wolves. Yet in one way those fearful men were wrong. We were not confident, we were desperate. My men knew as well as I did that speed would be everything this day. The fight must be finished quickly or we would be overwhelmed by enemies, who, at this moment, were still too confused to understand what was happening. We would live if we were fast and die if we were slow, and so my men charged with an eagerness that looked like confidence.

I led men into the right-hand alley. Three men could have made a shield wall to block that narrow passage, but instead of standing firm the enemy retreated. Swithun, still wearing his gaudy bishop’s robes and the horsetail hung helmet, was on my right, and he carried a long heavy spear that he thrust hard into the men who were backing away. One of those men tried to block the spear-thrust with his shield, but instead of taking the blade in the shield’s centre he used the edge, and the shield swung to one side with the violence of Swithun’s blow and I lunged Serpent-Breath into the space he left, twisted her as the blade was buried in his guts, and then, as he bent over the sword in agony, I slammed my shield’s iron rim onto the nape of his neck, and down he went.

Swithun was already attacking the man beyond as I kicked my man onto his back and tugged Serpent-Breath free of the clinging flesh. A blow struck my shield hard enough to drive the top rim back onto the iron strip that protected my nose. I thrust the shield away and saw a spear coming for my eyes, swayed to avoid it, rammed Serpent-Breath at the spearman, who was spitting insults, and glimpsed a movement to my left. The spearman knocked my thrust away with his shield as I saw a huge man in a dented helmet swinging an axe at my head. It had to be the same axe that had struck my shield so hard, and the big bastard was wielding it two-handed, and I was forced to raise my shield to cover my skull knowing that I invited a low thrust from the spear, but the spearman was also holding a shield, he was off balance, and I reckoned my mail could stop his one-handed lunge.

I instinctively stepped under the axe blow, using my shoulder to push the big man back against the alley’s left-hand wall, and, at the same time, I rammed Serpent-Breath at the spearman. I should have been using Wasp-Sting, there was no space for a long blade in this struggle. The spearman had stepped back, the axe blow was wasted on my shield, but the brute let go of the weapon and tried to wrest my shield away instead. ‘Kill him!’ he was bellowing. ‘Kill him!’ I had brought Serpent-Breath back and managed to find the space to put her tip against his lower belly and heave. I felt her sharpened point break through mail and puncture leather, slide into flesh and grate on bone. The bellow turned to a gasp of pain, but still he kept hold of my shield, knowing that as long as he held it I was vulnerable to his comrades. The spearman had stabbed at my thigh, it hurt, but the pain vanished as Swithun skewered the man, bellowing curses as he drove the man backwards with his spear impaled in the man’s chest. I pushed and twisted Serpent-Breath, then suddenly the big man’s resistance ended as Vidarr and Beornoth, a Norseman and a Saxon who always fought side by side, pushed past me with Vidarr shrieking of Thor and Beornoth calling on Christ, and both turned on him with their swords. I felt blood spray on me and the whole alley seemed to be flooding with blood as the huge man collapsed. The spearman was gasping against the other wall and screaming for mercy as others of my wolf pack turned on him. They had no mercy. The rest of the enemy had fled.

‘Are you hurt, lord?’ Beornoth asked me.

‘No! Keep going!’

The huge axeman had been wounded at least three times, but he still struggled to stand again, his face tight with pain or hate. Beornoth finished him by sawing his sword across the man’s throat and more blood spattered me. Ulfar, a Dane, had broken his sword and stooped to pick up the axe. ‘Keep going!’ I bellowed. ‘Keep going! Don’t let them stand!’

The alley ended in an open space that bordered the stables beneath the sea-facing ramparts. Those ramparts were high, with a wide fighting platform of solid oak on which a dozen of my cousin’s men stood. They seemed unsure what to do, though three carried spears that they hurled down at us, but we could see the flight of the weapons and so avoided them easily. The spears clattered uselessly on the stone. The men who had filled the right-hand alley had fled southwards, running to join the defenders of the High Gate that lay beyond a cluster of more storehouses, barns, and barracks. I was about to order my men to attack those buildings and so drive the defenders back to the High Gate, knowing that we could assault that formidable fortification along the rampart’s wide fighting platform, but before I could give the orders Finan shouted a warning and I saw that many of the survivors of the brief fight in the alleyways, perhaps thirty or forty men in all, were running north towards the Sea Gate. They were the men who had defended the wider alley that Finan had cleared, and their route south had been blocked by my warriors, so now they fled for the safety of the Sea Gate’s strong ramparts. The men who had been watching us from the high fighting platform also ran that way. ‘After them!’ I bellowed. ‘Finan! After them!’ He must have heard the despair in my voice because he immediately shouted at his men to run, and led them south.

And I was in despair. I was cursing myself for a fool.

I had left Gerbruht and a small force to defend the Sea Gate, but I should have left more. Gerbruht’s dozen men could stave off any attack from the harbour channel by staying on the high fighting platform above the arch, but now they would be assaulted from within the fortress, by men who could unbar and open the gates to let a flood of enemies into Bebbanburg. Gerbruht was a formidable warrior, and his men were experienced, but they would have to leave the high platform and fight to defend the archway against three or four times their number, and I had no faith that Gerbruht would realise what needed to be done. I snatched at Swithun’s arm. ‘Tell my son to go to the Sea Gate. Fast!’

Swithun ran back through the alley and up the steps while I set off after Finan, still cursing myself. And I was puzzled too. There was something unreal about this day, as if it were a waking dream instead of the fight I had anticipated my entire life. My men were running through the fortress like a pack of aimless hounds, first chasing one stag, then another, without any huntsman to guide them. And that was my fault. I realised that I had spent hours planning how to get into Bebbanburg, but I had not thought what I should do once I was inside. Now the enemy was dictating the battle, and we had been forced to give up the high ground to protect our rear. I was in a daze and making a mess of the day.