The Last Kingdom (38 page)

Odda looked down the hill at the nearer fires, which marked where the enemy sentries were posted in the meadow to our east. “They’ll know you’re coming,” he said, “and be ready for you.” He meant that a hundred men could not cross Cynuit’s skyline, go downhill, break through the sentries, and cross the marsh in silence. He was right. Before we had gone ten paces the sentries would have seen us and the alarm would be sounded and Ubba’s army, which was surely as ready for battle as our own, would stream from its southern encampment to confront my men in the meadow before they reached the marsh.

“But when the Danes see their ships burning,” I said, “they will go to the river’s bank, not to the meadow. And the riverbank is hemmed by marsh. They can’t outflank us there.” They could, of course, but the marsh would give them uncertain footing so it would not be so dangerous as being outflanked in the meadow.

“But you will never reach the riverbank,” he said, disappointed in my idea.

“A shadow-walker can reach it,” I said.

He looked at me and said nothing.

“I can reach it,” I said, “and when the first ship burns every Dane will run to the bank, and that’s when the hundred men make their charge. The Danes will be running to save their ships, and that will give the hundred men time to cross the marsh. They go as fast as they can, they join me, we burn more ships, and the Danes will be trying to kill us.” I pointed to the riverbank, showing where the Danes would go from their camp along the strip of firm ground to where the ships were beached. “And when the Danes are all on that bank,” I went on, “between the river and the marsh, you lead the fyrd to take them in the rear.”

He brooded, watching the ships. If we attacked at all then the obvious place was down the southern slope, straight into the heart of Ubba’s forces, and that would be a battle of shield wall against shield wall, our nine hundred men against his twelve hundred, and at the beginning we would have the advantage for many of Ubba’s men were posted around the hill and it would take time for those men to hurry back and join the Danish ranks, and in that time we would drive deep into their camp, but their numbers would grow and we might well be stopped, outflanked, and then would come the hard slaughter. And in that hard slaughter they would have the advantage of numbers and they would wrap around our ranks and our rearmost men, those with sickles instead of weapons, would begin to die.

But if I went down the hill and began to burn the boats, then the Danes would race down the riverbank to stop me, and that would put them on the narrow strip of riverside land, and if the hundred men under Leofric joined me, then we might hold them long enough for Odda to reach their rear and then it would be the Danes who would die, trapped between Odda, my men, the marsh, and the river. They would be trapped like the Northumbrian army had been trapped at Eoferwic.

But at Æsc’s Hill disaster had come to the side that first split its forces.

“It could work,” Odda said tentatively.

“Give me fifty men,” I urged him, “young ones.”

“Young?”

“They have to run down the hill,” I said. “They have to go fast. They have to reach the ships before the Danes, and they must do it in the dawn.” I spoke with a confidence I did not feel and I paused for his agreement, but he said nothing. “Win this, lord,” I said, and I did not call him “lord” because he outranked me, but because he was older than me, “then you will have saved Wessex. Alfred will reward you.”

He thought for a while and maybe it was the thought of a reward that persuaded him, for he nodded. “I will give you fifty men,” he said.

Ravn had given me much advice and all of it was good, but now, in the night wind, I remembered just one thing he had said to me on the night we first met, something I had never forgotten.

Never, he had said, never fight Ubba.

The fifty men were led by the shire reeve, Edor, a man who looked as hard as Leofric and, like Leofric, had fought in the big shield walls. He carried a cutoff boar spear as his favorite weapon, though a sword was strapped to his side. The spear, he said, had the weight and strength to punch through mail and could even break through a shield.

Edor, like Leofric, had simply accepted my idea. It never occurred to me that they might not accept it, yet looking back I am astonished that the battle of Cynuit was fought according to the idea of a twenty-year-old who had never stood in a slaughter wall. Yet I was tall, I was a lord, I had grown up among warriors, and I had the arrogant confidence of a man born to battle. I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, son of another Uhtred, and we had not held Bebbanburg and its lands by whimpering at altars. We are warriors.

Edor’s men and mine assembled behind Cynuit’s eastern rampart where they would wait until the first ship burned in the dawn. Leofric was on the right with the
Heahengel
’s crew, and I wanted him there because that was where the blow would fall when Ubba led his men to attack us at the river’s edge. Edor and the men of Defnascir were on the left and their chief job, apart from killing whomever they first met on the riverbank, was to snatch up flaming timbers from the Danish fires and hurl them into more ships. “We’re not trying to burn all the ships,” I said. “Just get four or five ablaze. That’ll bring the Danes like a swarm of bees.”

“Stinging bees,” a voice said from the dark.

“You’re frightened?” I asked scornfully. “They’re frightened! Their auguries are bad, they think they’re going to lose, and the last thing they want is to face men of Defnascir in a gray dawn. We’ll make them scream like women, we’ll kill them, and we’ll send them to their Danish hell.” That was the extent of my battle speech. I should have talked more, but I was nervous because I had to go down the hill first, first and alone. I had to live my childhood dream of shadow-walking, and Leofric and Edor would not lead the hundred men down to the river until they saw the Danes go to rescue their ships, and if I could not touch fire to the ships then there would be no attack and Odda’s fears would come back and the Danes would win and Wessex would die and there would be no more England. “So rest now,” I finished lamely. “It will be three or four hours till dawn.”

I went back to the rampart and Father Willibald joined me there, holding out his crucifix that had been carved from an ox’s thigh bone. “You want God’s blessing?” he asked me.

“What I want, father,” I said, “is your cloak.” He had a fine woolen cloak, hooded and dyed a dark brown. He gave it me and I tied the cords around my neck, hiding the sheen of my mail coat. “And in the dawn, father,” I said, “I want you to stay up here. The riverbank will be no place for priests.”

“If men die there,” he said, “then it is my place.”

“You want to go to heaven in the morning?”

“No.”

“Then stay here.” I spoke more savagely than I intended, but that was nervousness, and then it was time to go for, though the night was still dark and the dawn a long way off, I needed time to slink through the Danish lines. Leofric saw me off, walking with me to the northern flank of Cynuit, which was in moon-cast shadow. It was also the least guarded side of the hill, for the northern slope led to nothing except marshes and the Sæfern sea. I gave Leofric my shield. “I don’t need it,” I said. “It will just make me clumsy.”

He touched my arm. “You’re a cocky bastard, earsling, aren’t you?”

“Is that a fault?”

“No, lord,” he said, and that last word was high praise. “God go with you,” he added, “whichever god it is.”

I touched Thor’s hammer, then tucked it under my mail. “Bring the men fast when you see the Danes go to the ships,” I said.

“We’ll come fast,” he promised me, “if the marsh lets us.”

I had seen Danes cross the marsh in the daylight and had noted that it was soft ground, but not rank bogland. “You can cross it fast,” I said, then pulled the cloak’s hood over my helmet. “Time to go,” I said.

Leofric said nothing and I dropped down from the rampart into the shallow ditch. So now I would become what I had always wanted to be, a shadow-walker. Childhood’s dream had become life and death, and touching Serpent-Breath’s hilt for luck, I crossed the ditch’s lip. I went at a crouch, and halfway down the hill I dropped to my belly and slithered like a serpent, black against the grass, inching my way toward a space between two dying fires.

The Danes were sleeping, or close to sleep. I could see them sitting by the dying fires, and once I was out of the hill’s shadow there was enough moonlight to reveal me and there was no cover for the meadow had been cropped by sheep, but I moved like a ghost, a belly-crawling ghost, inching my way, making no noise, a shadow on the grass, and all they had to do was look, or walk between the fires, but they heard nothing, suspected nothing, and so saw nothing. It took an age, but I slipped through them, never going closer to an enemy than twenty paces, and once past them I was in the marsh and there the tussocks offered shadow and I could move faster, wriggling through slime and shallow water, and the only scare came when I startled a bird from its nest and it leapt into the air with a cry of alarm and a swift whirr of wings. I sensed the Danes staring toward the marsh, but I was motionless, black, and unmoving in the broken shadow, and after a while there was only silence. I waited, water seeping through my mail, and I prayed to Hoder, blind son of Odin and god of the night. Look after me, I prayed, and I wished I had made a sacrifice to Hoder, but I had not, and I thought that Ealdwulf would be looking down at me and I vowed to make him proud. I was doing what he had always wanted me to do, carrying Serpent-Breath against the Danes.

I worked my way eastward, behind the sentries, going to where the ships were beached. No gray showed in the eastern sky. I still went slowly, staying on my belly, going slowly enough for the fears to work on me. I was aware of a muscle quivering in my right thigh, of a thirst that could not be quenched, of a sourness in the bowels. I kept touching Serpent-Breath’s hilt, remembering the charms that Ealdwulf and Brida had worked on the blade. Never, Ravn had said, never fight Ubba.

The east was still dark. I crept on, close to the sea now so I could gaze up the wide Sæfern and see nothing except the shimmer of the sinking moon on the rippled water that looked like a sheet of hammered silver. The tide was flooding, the muddy shore narrowing as the sea rose. There would be salmon in the Pedredan, I thought, salmon swimming with the tide, going back to the sea, and I touched the sword hilt for I was close to the strip of firm land where the hovels stood and the ship guards waited. My thigh shivered. I felt sick.

But blind Hoder was watching over me. The ship guards were no more alert than their comrades at the hill’s foot, and why should they be? They were farther from Odda’s forces, and they expected no trouble; indeed they were there only because the Danes never left their ships unguarded, and these ship guards had mostly gone into the fishermen’s hovels to sleep, leaving just a handful of men sitting by the small fires. Those men were motionless, probably half asleep, though one was pacing up and down beneath the high prows of the beached ships.

I stood.

I had shadow-walked, but now I was on Danish ground, behind their sentries, and I undid the cloak’s cords, took it off, and wiped the mud from my mail, and then walked openly toward the ships, my boots squelching in the last yards of marshland, and then I just stood by the northernmost boat, threw my helmet down in the shadow of the ship, and waited for the one Dane who was on his feet to discover me.

And what would he see? A man in mail, a lord, a shipmaster, a Dane, and I leaned on the ship’s prow and stared up at the stars. My heart thumped, my thigh quivered, and I thought that if I died this morning at least I would be with Ragnar again. I would be with him in Valhalla’s hall of the dead, except some men believed that those who did not die in battle went instead to Niflheim, that dreadful cold hell of the Norsemen where the corpse goddess Hel stalks through the mists and the serpent Corpse-Ripper slithers across the frost to gnaw the dead, but surely, I thought, a man who died in a hall-burning would go to Valhalla, not to gray Niflheim. Surely Ragnar was with Odin, and then I heard the Dane’s footsteps and I glanced at him with a smile. “A chilly morning,” I said.

“It is.” He was an older man with a grizzled beard and he was plainly puzzled by my sudden appearance, but he was not suspicious.

“All quiet,” I said, jerking my head to the north to suggest I had been visiting the sentries on the Sæfern’s side of the hill.

“They’re frightened of us,” he said.

“So they should be.” I faked a huge yawn, then pushed myself away from the ship and walked a couple of paces north as though I was stretching tired limbs, then pretended to notice my helmet at the water’s edge. “What’s that?”

He took the bait, going into the ship’s shadow to bend over the helmet, and I drew my knife, stepped close to him, and drove the blade up into his throat. I did not slit his throat, but stabbed it, plunging the blade straight in and twisting it and at the same time I pushed him forward, driving his face into the water and I held him there so that if he did not bleed to death he would drown, and it took a long time, longer than I expected, but men are hard to kill. He struggled for a time and I thought the noise he made might bring the men from the nearest fire, but that fire was forty or fifty paces down the beach and the small waves of the river were loud enough to cover the Dane’s death throes, and so I killed him and no one knew of it, none but the gods saw it, and when his soul was gone I pulled the knife from his throat, retrieved my helmet, and went back to the ship’s prow.

And waited there until dawn lightened the eastern horizon. Waited till there was a rim of gray at the edge of England.

And it was time.

I strolled toward the nearest fire. Two men sat there. “Kill one,” I sang softly, “and two then three, kill four and five, and then some more.” It was a Danish rowing chant, one that I had heard so often on the
Wind-Viper.
“You’ll be relieved soon,” I greeted them cheerfully.