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 which 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 cut-off boar spear as his favourite 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 whoever 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 grey 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 woollen 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 that was in mooncast 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 bog-land. ‘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 towards 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 leaped into the air with a cry of alarm and a swift whirr of wings. I sensed the Danes staring towards 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 eastwards, behind the sentries, going to where the ships were beached. No grey 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,