A charge of Danes met them, shield on shield, and Ragnar was roaring his victory and stabbing down into the fallen man, and suddenly there were no more Wessex men resisting us, unless they were dead or wounded, and their army was running, their king and their prince both spurring away on horseback surrounded by priests, and we jeered and cursed them, told them they were women, that they fought like girls, that they were cowards.
And then we rested, catching breath on a field of blood, our own corpses among the enemy dead, and Ragnar saw me then, and saw Brida, and laughed. ‘What are you two doing here?’
For answer Brida held up her bloodied spear and Ragnar glanced at Serpent-Breath and saw her reddened tip. ‘Fools,’ he said, but fondly, and then one of our men brought a West Saxon prisoner and made him inspect the lord whom Ragnar had killed. ‘Who is he?’ Ragnar demanded.
I translated for him.
The man made the sign of the cross. ‘It is the Lord Æthelwulf,’ he said.
And I said nothing.
‘What did he say?’ Ragnar asked.
‘It is my uncle,’ I said.
‘Ælfric?’ Ragnar was astonished. ‘Ælfric from Northumbria?’
I shook my head. ‘He is my mother’s brother,’ I explained, ‘Æthelwulf of Mercia.’ I did not know that he was my mother’s brother, perhaps there was another Æthelwulf in Mercia, but I felt certain all the same that this was Æthelwulf, my kin, and the man who had won the victory over the Earls Sidroc. Ragnar, the previous day’s defeat revenged, whooped for joy while I stared into the dead man’s face. I had never known him, so why was I sad? He had a long face with a fair beard and a trimmed moustache. A good-looking man, I thought, and he was family, and that seemed strange for I knew no family except Ragnar, Ravn, Rorik and Brida.
Ragnar had his men strip Æthelwulf of his armour and take his precious helmet, and then, because the Ealdorman had fought so bravely, Ragnar left the corpse its other clothes and put a sword into its hand so that the gods could take the Mercian’s soul to the great hall where brave warriors feast with Odin.
And perhaps the Valkyries did take his soul, because next morning, when we went out to bury the dead, Ealdorman Æthelwulf’s body was gone.
I heard later, much later, that he was indeed my uncle. I also heard that some of his own men had crept back to the field that night and somehow found their lord’s body and taken it to his own country for a Christian burial.
And perhaps that is true too. Or perhaps Æthelwulf is in Odin’s corpse-hall.
But we had seen the West Saxons off. And we were still hungry. So it was time to fetch the enemy’s food.
Why did I fight for the Danes? All lives have questions, and that one still haunts me, though in truth there was no mystery. To my young mind the alternative was to be sitting in some monastery learning to read, and give a boy a choice like that and he would fight for the devil rather than scratch on a tile or make marks on a clay tablet. And there was Ragnar, whom I loved, and who sent his three ships across the Temes to find hay and oats stored in Mercian villages and he found just enough so that by the time the army marched westwards our horses were in reasonable condition.
We were marching on Æbbanduna, another frontier town on the Temes between Wessex and Mercia, and, according to our prisoner, a place where the West Saxons had amassed their supplies. Take Æbbanduna and Æthelred’s army would be short of food, Wessex would fall, England would vanish and Odin would triumph.
There was the small matter of defeating the West Saxon army first, but we marched just four days after routing them in front of the walls of Readingum, so we were blissfully confident that they were doomed. Rorik stayed behind, for he was sick again, and the many hostages, like the Mercian twins Ceolberht and Ceolnoth, also stayed in Readingum, guarded there by the small garrison we left to watch over the precious ships.
The rest of us marched or rode. I was among the older of the boys who accompanied the army, our job in battle was to carry the spare shields that could be pushed forward through the ranks in battle. Shields got chopped to pieces in fighting. I have often seen warriors fighting with a sword or axe in one hand, and nothing but the iron shield boss hung with scraps of wood in the other. Brida also came with us, mounted behind Ravn on his horse, and for a time I walked with them, listening as Ravn rehearsed the opening lines of a poem called the Fall of the West Saxons. He had got as far as listing our heroes, and describing how they readied themselves for battle, when one of those heroes, the gloomy Earl Guthrum, rode alongside us. ‘You look well,’ he greeted Ravn in a tone which suggested that was a condition unlikely to last.
‘I cannot look at all,’ Ravn said. He liked puns.
Guthrum, swathed in a black cloak, looked down at the river. We were advancing along a low range of hills and, even in the winter sunlight, the river valley looked lush. ‘Who will be King of Wessex?’ he asked.
‘Halfdan?’ Ravn suggested mischievously.
‘Big kingdom,’ Guthrum said gloomily. ‘Could do with an older man.’ He looked at me sourly. ‘Who’s that?’
‘You forget I am blind,’ Ravn said, ‘so who is who? Or are you asking me which older man you think should be made king? Me, perhaps?’
‘No, no! The boy leading your horse. Who is he?’
‘That is the Earl Uhtred,’ Ravn said grandly, ‘who understands that poets are of such importance that their horses must be led by mere Earls.’
‘Uhtred? A Saxon?’
‘Are you a Saxon, Uhtred?’
‘I’m a Dane,’ I said.
‘And a Dane,’ Ravn went on, ‘who wet his sword at Readingum. Wet it, Guthrum, with Saxon blood.’ That was a barbed comment, for Guthrum’s black-clothed men had not fought outside the walls.
‘And who’s the girl behind you?’
‘Brida,’ Ravn said, ‘who will one day be a skald and a sorceress.’
Guthrum did not know what to say to that. He glowered at his horse’s mane for a few strides, then returned to his original subject. ‘Does Ragnar want to be king?’
‘Ragnar wants to kill people,’ Ravn said. ‘My son’s ambitions are very few; merely to hear jokes, solve riddles, get drunk, give rings, lie belly to belly with women, eat well and go to Odin.’
‘Wessex needs a strong man,’ Guthrum said obscurely. ‘A man who understands how to govern.’
‘Sounds like a husband,’ Ravn said.
‘We take their strongholds,’ Guthrum said, ‘but we leave half their land untouched! Even Northumbria is only half garrisoned. Mercia has sent men to Wessex, and they’re supposed to be on our side. We win, Ravn, but we don’t finish the job.’
‘And how do we do that?’