Sword Song (15 page)

I wore a cloak of wool dyed black on which Gisela had embroidered a white lightning flash that ran from my neck to my heels. The cloak could be an encumbrance in battle, but I wore it now, for it made me look larger, and I was already taller and broader than most men. Thor’s hammer hung at my neck, and that alone was a poor thing, a miserable amulet made of iron that rusted constantly, and all the scraping and cleaning had worn it thin and misshapen over the years, but I had taken that little iron hammer with my fists when I was a boy and I loved it. I wear it to this day.

My helmet was a glorious thing, polished to an eye-blinding shine, inlaid with silver and crested with a silver wolf’s head. The face-plates were decorated with silver spirals. That helmet alone told an enemy I was a man of substance. If a man killed me and took that helmet he would be instantly rich, but my enemies would rather have taken my arm rings, which, like the Danes, I wore over my mail sleeves. My rings were silver and gold, and there were so many that some had to be worn above my elbows. They spoke of men killed and wealth hoarded. My boots were of thick leather and had iron plates sewn around them to deflect the spear thrust that comes under the shield. The shield itself, rimmed with iron, was painted with a wolf’s head,
my badge, and at my left hip hung Serpent-Breath and at my right Wasp-Sting, and I strode toward the gate with the sun rising behind me to throw my long shadow on the filth-strewn street.

I was a warlord in my glory, I had come to kill, and no one at the gate knew it.

They saw us coming, but assumed we were Danes. Most of the enemy were on the high rampart, but five were standing in the open gate and all were watching Sigefrid’s force that streamed down the brief steep slope to the Fleot. The Saxon settlement was not far beyond and I hoped Æthelred was still there. “Steapa,” I called, still far enough from the gate so that no one there could hear me speak English, “take your men and kill those turds in the archway.”

Steapa’s skull face grinned. “You want me to close the gate?” he asked.

“Leave it open,” I said. I wanted to lure Sigefrid back to prevent his hardened men getting among Æthelred’s fyrd, and if the gate were open Sigefrid would be more inclined to attack us.

The gate was built between two massive stone bastions, each with its own stairway and I remembered how, when I was a child, Father Beocca had once described the Christian heaven to me. It would have crystal stairs, he had claimed, and enthusiastically described a great flight of glassy steps climbing to a white-hung throne of gold where his god sat. Angels would surround that throne, each brighter than the sun, while the saints, as he had called the dead Christians, would cluster about the stairs and sing. It sounded dull then and still does. “In the next world,” I told Pyrlig, “we will all be gods.”

He looked at me with surprise, wondering where that statement had come from. “We will be with God,” he corrected me.

“In your heaven, maybe,” I said, “but not in mine.”

“There is only one heaven, Lord Uhtred.”

“Then let mine be that one heaven,” I said, and I knew at that moment that my truth was the truth, and that Pyrlig, Alfred, and all the other Christians were wrong. They were wrong. We did not go toward the light, we slid from it. We went to chaos. We went to death and to
death’s heaven, and I began to shout as we drew nearer the enemy. “A heaven for men! A heaven for warriors! A heaven where swords shine! A heaven for brave men! A heaven of savagery! A heaven of corpse-gods! A heaven of death!”

They all stared at me, friend and enemy alike. They stared and they thought me mad, and perhaps I was mad as I climbed the right-hand stairway where the man on crutches gazed at me. I kicked one of his crutches away so that he fell. The crutch clattered down the stairs and one of my men booted it back to the ground. “Death’s heaven!” I screamed, and every man on the rampart had his eyes on me and still they thought I was a friend because I shouted my weird war cry in Danish.

I smiled behind my twin face-plates, then drew Serpent-Breath. Beneath me, out of my sight, Steapa and his men had begun their killing.

Not ten minutes before I had been in a waking dream, and now the madness had come. I should have waited for my men to climb the stairs and form a shield wall, but some impulse drove me forward. I was screaming still, but screaming my own name now, and Serpent-Breath was singing her hunger-song and I was a lord of war.

The happiness of battle. The ecstasy. It is not just deceiving an enemy, but feeling like a god. I had once tried to explain it to Gisela and she had touched my face with her long fingers and smiled. “It’s better than this?” she had asked.

“The same,” I had said.

But it is not the same. In battle a man risks all to gain reputation. In bed he risks nothing. The joy is comparable, but the joy of a woman is fleeting, while reputation is forever. Men die, women die, all die, but reputation lives after a man, and that was why I screamed my name as Serpent-Breath took her first soul. He was a tall man with a battered helmet and a long-bladed spear that he instinctively thrust at me and, just as instinctively, I turned his lunge away with my shield and put Serpent-Breath into his throat. There was a man to my right and I shoulder-charged him, driving him down, and stamped on his groin
while my shield took a sword swing from my left. I stepped over the man whose groin I had pulped and the rampart’s protective wall was on my right now, where I wanted it, and ahead of me was the enemy.

I drove into them. “Uhtred!” I was shouting, “Uhtred of Bebbanburg!”

I was inviting death. By attacking alone I let the enemy get behind me, but at that moment I was immortal. Time had slowed so that the enemy moved like snails and I was fast as the lightning on my cloak. I was shouting still as Serpent-Breath lunged into a man’s eye, driving hard till the bone of his socket stopped her thrust, and then I swept her left to slam down a sword coming at my face, and my shield lifted to take an ax blow, and Serpent-Breath dropped and I pushed her hard forward to pierce the leather jerkin of the man whose sword I had parried. I twisted her so the blade would not be seized by his belly while she gouged his blood and guts, and then I stepped left and rammed the iron boss of the shield at the axman.

He staggered back. Serpent-Breath came from the swordsman’s belly and flew wide right to crash against another sword. I followed her, still screaming, and saw the terror on that enemy’s face, and terror on an enemy breeds cruelty. “Uhtred,” I shouted, and stared at him, and he saw death coming, and he tried to back from me, but other men came behind to block his retreat and I was smiling as I slashed Serpent-Breath across his face. Blood sprayed in the dawn, and the backswing sliced his throat and two men pushed past him and I parried one with the sword and the other with my shield.

Those two men were no fools. They came with their shields touching and their only ambition was to push me back against the rampart and hold me there, pinned by their shields, so that I could not use Serpent-Breath. And once they had trapped me they would let other men come to jab me with blades until I lost too much blood to stand. Those two knew how to kill me, and they came to do it.

But I was laughing. I was laughing because I knew what they planned, and they seemed so slow and I rammed my own shield forward to crash against theirs and they thought they had trapped me
because I could not hope to push two men away. They crouched behind their shields and heaved forward and I just stepped back, snatching my own shield backward so that they stumbled forward as my resistance vanished. Their shields were slightly lowered as they stumbled and Serpent-Breath flickered like a viper’s tongue so that her bloodied tip smashed into the forehead of the man on my left. I felt his thick bone break, saw his eyes glaze, heard the crash of his dropped shield, and I swept her to the right and the second man parried. He rammed his shield at me, hoping to unbalance me, but just then there was a mighty shout from my left. “Christ Jesus and Alfred!” It was Father Pyrlig, and behind him the wide bastion was now swarming with my men. “You damned heathen fool,” Pyrlig shouted at me.

I laughed. Pyrlig’s sword cut into my opponent’s arm, and Serpent-Breath beat down his shield. I remember he looked at me then. He had a fine helmet with raven wings fixed to its sides. His beard was golden, his eyes blue, and in those eyes was the knowledge of his imminent death as he tried to lift his sword with a wounded arm.

“Hold tight to your sword,” I told him. He nodded.

Pyrlig killed him, though I did not see it. I was moving past the man to attack the remaining enemy and beside me Clapa was swinging a huge ax so violently that he was as much a danger to our side as to the enemy, but no enemy wanted to face the two of us. They were fleeing along the ramparts and the gate was ours.

I leaned on the low outer wall and immediately stood upright because the stones shifted under my weight. The masonry was crumbling. I slapped the loose stonework and laughed aloud for joy. Sihtric grinned at me. He had a bloodied sword. “Any amulets, lord?” he asked.

“That one,” I pointed to the man whose helmet was decorated with raven wings, “he died well, I’ll take his.”

Sihtric stooped to find the man’s hammer-image. Beyond him Osferth was staring at the half-dozen dead men who lay in splats of blood across the stones. He was carrying a spear that had a reddened tip. “You killed someone?” I asked him.

He looked at me wide-eyed, then nodded. “Yes, lord.”

“Good,” I said and jerked my head toward the sprawling corpses. “Which one?”

“It wasn’t here, lord,” he said. He seemed puzzled for a moment, then looked back at the steps we had climbed. “It was over there, lord.”

“On the steps?”

“Yes,” he said.

I stared at him long enough to make him uncomfortable. “Tell me,” I said at last, “did he threaten you?”

“He was an enemy, lord.”

“What did he do,” I asked, “wave his one crutch at you?”

“He,” Osferth began, then appeared to run out of words. He stared down at a man I had killed, then frowned. “Lord?”

“Yes?”

“You told us it was death to leave the shield wall.”

I stooped to clean Serpent-Breath’s blade on a dead man’s cloak. “So?”

“You left the shield wall, lord,” Osferth said, almost reprovingly.

I straightened and touched my arm rings. “You live,” I told him harshly, “by obeying the rules. You make a reputation, boy, by breaking them. But you do not make a reputation by killing cripples.” I spat those last words, then turned to see that Sigefrid’s men had crossed the River Fleot, but had now become aware of the commotion behind them and had stopped to stare back at the gate.

Pyrlig appeared beside me. “Let’s get rid of this rag,” he said, and I saw there was a banner hanging from the wall. Pyrlig hauled it up and showed me Sigefrid’s raven badge. “We’ll let them know,” Pyrlig said, “that the city has a new master.” He hauled up his mail coat and pulled out a banner that had been folded and tucked into his waistband. He shook it loose to reveal a black cross on a dull white field. “Praise God,” Pyrlig said, then dropped the banner over the wall, securing it by weighting its top edge with dead men’s weapons. Now Sigefrid would know that Ludd’s Gate was lost. The Christian banner was flaunted in his face.

Yet, for the next few moments, things were quiet. I suppose Sigefrid’s men were astonished by what had happened and were recovering from that surprise. They were no longer moving toward the new Saxon town, but were still staring back at the cross-hung gate, while inside the city groups of men gathered in the streets and gazed up at us.

I was staring toward the new town. I could see no sign of Æthelred’s men. There was a wooden palisade cresting the low slope where the Saxon town was built and it was possible Æthelred’s troops were behind the fence that had decayed in places and was entirely missing in others.

“If Æthelred doesn’t come,” Pyrlig said softly.

“Then we’re dead,” I finished the remark for him. To my left the river slid gray as misery toward the broken bridge and distant sea. Gulls were white on the gray. Far off, on the southern bank, I could see a few hovels where smoke rose. That was Wessex. In front of me, where Sigefrid’s men remained motionless, was Mercia, while behind me, north of the river, was East Anglia.

“Do we shut the gate?” Pyrlig asked.

“No,” I said. “I told Steapa to leave it open.”

“You did?”

“We want Sigefrid to attack us,” I said, and I thought that if Æthelred had abandoned his attack then I would die in the gate where the three kingdoms met. I still could not see Æthelred’s force, yet I was relying on my cousin’s men to give us victory. If I could tempt Sigefrid’s warriors back to the gate, and hold them there, then Æthelred could assail them from behind. That was why I had to leave the gate open, as an invitation to Sigefrid. If I had shut it then he could have used another entrance to the Roman city, and his men would not be exposed to my cousin’s assault.

The more immediate problem was that the Danes who had stayed in the city were at last recovering from their surprise. Some were in the streets while others gathered on the walls either side of Ludd’s Gate. The walls were lower than the gate’s bastion, which meant any attack
on us had to be made up the narrow stone steps which climbed from wall to bastion. Each of those steps would need five men to hold them, as would the twin stairways climbing from the street. I thought about abandoning the bastion’s top, but if the fight went badly in the archway, then the high rampart was our best refuge. “You’ll have twenty men,” I told Pyrlig, “to hold this bastion. And you can have him as well,” I nodded toward Osferth. I did not want Alfred’s cripple-killing son in the arch below where the fighting would be fiercest. It was down there that we would make two shield walls, one facing into the city and the other looking out toward the Fleot, and there the shield walls would clash, and there, I thought, we would die because I still could not see Æthelred’s army.

I was tempted to run away. It would have been simple enough to have retreated the way we had come, thrusting aside the enemy in the streets. We could have taken Sigefrid’s boat, the
Wave-Tamer
, and used her to cross to the West Saxon bank. But I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg, stuffed full of warrior pride, and I had sworn to take Lundene. We stayed.