The Pale Horseman (46 page)

And so we killed. Alfred had not meant this to happen. He had expected to wait for the
Danish attack and hoped we would resist it, but instead we had thrown off his leash and were
doing his work, and he had the wit to send Arnulf's men out to the right because my men were
among the enemy. The horsemen had tried to come around our rear, but the men of Suth Seaxa saw
them off with shields and swords, then guarded the open flank as all Alfred's men from
Æthelingaeg, and all Harald's men from Defnascir and Thornsaeta joined the slaughter. My
cousin was there, with his Mercians, and he was a stout fighter. I watched him parry, stab,
put down a man, take on another, kill him, and go on steadily. We were making the hilltop
rich with Danish blood because we had the fury and they did not, and the men who had fled the
field, Osric's men, were coming back to join the fight.

The horsemen went. I did not see them go, though their tale will be told. I was fighting,
screaming, shouting at Danes to come and be killed, and Pyrlig was beside me, holding a sword
now, and the whole left-hand side of Svein's shield wall had broken and its survivors were
making small groups, and we attacked them. I charged one group with the shield, using its boss
to slam a man back and stabbing with Serpent-Breath, feeling her break through mail and
leather, and Leofric appeared from somewhere, axe swinging, and Pyrlig was ramming his
sword's tip into a man's face, and for every Dane there were two Saxons and the enemy stood
no chance. One man shouted for mercy and Leofric broke his helmet apart with the axe so that
blood and brains oozed onto the jagged metal and I kicked the man aside and plunged
Serpent-Breath into a man's groin so that he screamed like a woman in childbirth. The poets
often sing of that battle, and for once they get something right when they tell of the sword
joy, the blade song, the slaughter. We tore Svein's men to bloody ruin, and we did it with
passion, skill and savagery. The battle-calm was on me at last and I could do no wrong.
Serpent-Breath had her own life and she stole it from the Danes who tried to oppose me, but
those Danes were broken and running and all the left wing of Svein's vaunted troops was
defeated.

And there was suddenly no enemy near me except for the dead and injured. Alfred's
nephew, Æthelwold, was jabbing his sword at one of the wounded Danes,

'Either kill him,' I snarled, 'or let him live.' The man had a broken leg and had an eye
hanging down his bloody cheek and he was no danger to anyone.

'I have to kill one pagan,' Æthelwold said. He prodded the man with the sword tip and I
kicked his blade aside, and would have helped the wounded man except it was then that I saw
Haesten.

He was at the hill's edge, a fugitive, and I shouted his name. He turned and saw me, or saw
a blood-drenched warrior in mail and a wolf-crested helmet, and he stared at me, then
perhaps he recognised the helmet for he fled.

'Coward!' I shouted at him. 'You treacherous, bastard coward! You swore me an oath! I
made you rich! I saved your rotten life!'

He turned then, half grinned at me and waved his left arm on which hung the splintered
remnants of a shield, then he ran to what remained of the right-hand side of Svein's shield
wall, and that was still in good order, its shields locked tight. There were five or six
hundred men there, and they had swung back, then retreated towards the fort, but now they
checked because Alfred's men, having no one left to kill, were turning on them. Haesten
joined the Danish ranks, pushing through the shields, and I saw the eagle-wing banner above
them and knew that Ragnar, my friend, was leading those survivors.

I paused. Leofric was shouting at men to form a shield wall and I knew this attack had lost
its fury, but we had damaged them. We had killed Svein and a good number of his men, and the
Danes were now penned back against the fort. I went to the hill's edge, following a trail of
blood on the wet grass, and saw that the white horse had bolted over the down's lip and now lay,
its legs grotesquely cocked in the air and its white pelt spattered with blood, a few yards
down the slope.

'That was a good horse,' Pyrlig said. He had joined me on the edge of the hill. I had thought
this crest was the top of the escarpment, but the land was tangled here, as though a giant
had kicked the hillside with a massive boot. The ground fell away to make a steep valley that
suddenly climbed to a farther crest that was the real edge of the downs, and the steep
valley sloped up to the fort's eastern corner, and I wondered whether it would offer a way
into the fastness.

Pyrlig was still staring at the dead horse. 'You know what we say at home?' he asked me. 'We
say that a good horse is worth two good women, that a good woman is worth two good hounds, and
that a good hound is worth two good horses.'

'You say what?'

'Never mind,' he touched my shoulder. 'For a Saxon, Uhtred, you fight well. Like a
Briton.'

I decided the valley offered no advantage over a direct assault and turned away to see
that Ragnar was retreating step by step towards the fort. I knew this was the moment to
attack him, to keep the battle-anger alive and the slaughter fresh, but our men were
plundering the dead and the dying and none had the energy to renew the assault, and that
meant we would have the harder task of killing Danes protected by a rampart. I thought of my
father, killed in an attack on a wall. He had not shown much liking for me, probably because
1 had been a small child when he died, and now I would have to follow him into the death-trap
of a well protected wall. Fate is inexorable.

Svein's banner of the white horse had been captured and a man was waving it towards the
Danes. Another had Svein's helmet on the tip of a spear, and at first I thought it was Svein's
head, then I saw it was only the helmet. The white horsetail plume was pink now. Father
Willibald was holding his hands to heaven, saying a prayer of thanks, and that was
premature, I thought, for all we had done was break Svein's men and Guthrum's troops still
waited for us behind their walls. And Ragnar was there too, safe in the fort. Its walls made a
semi-circle jutting into the downs, ending at the escarpment's lip. They were high walls,
protected by a ditch.

'It'll be a bastard crossing those ramparts,' I said.

'Maybe we won't have to,' Pyrlig answered.

'Of course we have to.'

'Not if Alfred can talk them out of there,' Pyrlig said, and he pointed and I saw that the
king, accompanied by two priests and by Osric and Harald, was approaching the fort. 'He's
going to let them surrender,' Pyrlig said.

I could not believe this was the time to talk. This was the killing time, not a place for
negotiations.

'They won't surrender,' I said, 'of course they won't! They still think they can beat
us.'

'Alfred will try to persuade them,' Pyrlig said.

'No,' I shook my head. 'He'll offer them a truce.' I spoke angrily. 'He'll offer to take
hostages. He'll preach to them. It's what he always does.'

I thought about going to join him, if for nothing else to add some sourness to his
reasonable suggestions, but I could not summon the effort. Three Danes had gone to talk to
him, but I knew they would not accept his offer. They were not beaten, far from it. They still
had more men than we did and they had the walls of the fort, and the battle was still theirs to
win.

Then I heard the shouts. Shouts of anger and screams of pain, and I turned and saw that the
Danish horsemen had reached our women, and the women were screaming and there was nothing
we could do.

The Danish horsemen had expected to slaughter the broken remnants of Alfred's shield
wall, but instead it had been Svein's men who had been broken and the riders, out on Svein's
left flank, had retreated into the downs. They must have thought to circle about our army and
rejoin Guthrum from the west, and on the way they had seen our women and horses and smelled
easy plunder.

Yet our women had weapons, and there were a few wounded men there, and together they had
resisted the horsemen. There was a brief flurry of killing, then the Danish riders, with
nothing to show for their attack, rode away westwards. It had taken a few moments, nothing
more, but Hild had snatched up a spear and run at a horseman, screaming hate for the horrors
the Danes had inflicted on her in Cippanhamm, and Eanflaed, who saw it all, said that Hild
sank the spear in a Dane's leg and the man had chopped down with his sword, and Iseult, who had
gone to help Hild, had parried the blow with another sword, and a second Dane caught her from
behind with an axe, and then a rush of screaming women drove the Danes away. Hild lived, but
Iseult's skull had been broken open and her head almost split into two. She was dead.

'She has gone to God,' Pyrlig told me when Leofric brought us the news. I was weeping, but I
did not know whether it was sorrow or anger that consumed me, I could say nothing. Pyrlig held
my shoulders. 'She is with God, Uhtred.'

'Then the men who sent her there must go to hell,' I said. 'Any hell. Freeze or burn, the
bastards!'

I pulled away from Pyrlig and strode towards Alfred. I saw Wulfhere then. He was a
prisoner, guarded by two of Alfred's bodyguard, and he brightened when he saw me as though
he thought I was a friend, but I just spat at him and walked on past. Alfred frowned when I
joined him. He was escorted by Osric and Harald, and by Father Beocca and Bishop Alewold,
none of whom spoke Danish, but one of the Danes was an English-speaker. There were three of
them, all strangers to me, but Beocca told me their spokesman was called Hrothgar Ericson and
I knew he wasone of Guthrum's chieftains.

'They attacked the women,' I told Alfred. The king just stared at me, perhaps not
understanding what I had said. 'They attacked the women!' I repeated.

'He's whimpering,' the Danish interpreter spoke to his two companions, 'that the women
were attacked.'

'If I whimper,' I turned on the man in fury, 'then you will scream.' I spoke in Danish. 'I
shall pull your guts out of your arsehole, wrap them around your filthy neck and feed your
eyeballs to my hounds. Now if you want to translate, you shrivelled bastard, translate
properly, or else go back to your vomit.'

The man blinked, but said nothing. Hrothgar, resplendent in mail and Silvered helmet,
half smiled.

'Tell your king,' he said, 'that we might agree to withdraw to Cippanhamm, but we shall
want hostages.'

I turned on Alfred: 'How many men does Guthrum still have?' He was still unhappy that I had
joined him, but he took the question seriously. 'Enough,' he said.

'Enough to hold Cippanhamm and a half-dozen other towns. We break them now.'

'You are welcome to try,' Hrothgar said when my words were translated.

I turned back to him. 'I killed Ubba,' I said, 'and I put Svein down, and next I shall cut
Guthrum's throat and send him to his whore-mother. We'll try.'

'Uhtred.' Alfred did not know what I had said, but he had heard my tone and he tried to calm
me.

'There's work to be done, lord,' I said. It was anger speaking in me, a fury at the Danes and
an equal fury at Alfred, who was once again offering the enemy terms. He had done it so
often. He would beat them in battle and immediately make a truce because he believed they
would become Christians and live in brotherly peace. That was his desire, to live in a
Christian Britain devoted to piety, but on that day I was right. Guthrum was not beaten, he
still outnumbered us, and he had to be destroyed.

'Tell them,' Alfred said, 'that they can surrender to us now. Tell them they can lay down
their weapons and come out of the fort.' Hrothgar treated that proposal with the scorn it
deserved. Most of Guthrum's men had yet to fight. They were far from defeated, and the green
walls were high and the ditches were deep, and it was the sight of those ramparts that had
prompted Alfred to speak with the enemy. He knew men must die, many men, and that was the
price he had been unwilling to pay a year before when Guthrum had been trapped in
Exanceaster, but it was a price that had to be paid. It was the price of Wessex.

Hrothgar had nothing more to say, so turned away. 'Tell Earl Ragnar,' I called after him,
'that I am still his brother.'

'He will doubtless see you in Valhalla one day,' Hrothgar called back, then waved a
negligent hand to me. I suspected that the Danes had never intended to negotiate a
truce, let alone a surrender, but when Alfred offered to talk they had accepted because it
gave them time to organise their defences.

Alfred scowled at me. He was plainly annoyed that I had intervened, but before he could
say anything Beocca spoke. 'What happened to the women?' he asked.

'They fought the bastards off,' I said, 'but Iseult died.'

'Iseult,' Alfred said, and then he saw the tears in my eyes and did not know what to say. He
flinched, stuttered incoherently, then closed his eyes as if in prayer. 'I am glad,' he said
after he had collected his thoughts, 'that she died a Christian.'

'Amen,' Beocca said.

'I would rather she was a live pagan,' I snarled, and then we went back to our army and
Alfred again summoned his commanders. There was really no choice. We had to assault the
fort. Alfred talked for a time about establishing a siege, but that was not practical. We
would have to sustain an army on the summit of the downs and, though Osric insisted the
enemy had no springs inside the fort, neither did we have springs close by. Both armies would
be thirsty, and we did not have enough men to stop Danes going down the steep embankment at
night to fetch water. And if the siege lasted longer than a week, then men of the fyrd would
begin to slip home to look after their fields, and Alfred would be tempted to mercy,
especially if Guthrum promised to convert to Christianity.

So we urged an assault on Alfred. There could be nothing clever. Shield walls must be made
and men sent against the ramparts, and Alfred knew that every man in the army must join the
attack. Wiglaf and the men of Sumorsaete would attack on the left, Alfred's men in the
centre, while Osric, whose fyrd had gathered again and was now reinforced by the men who had
deserted from Guthrum's army, would assault on the right.