And then I understood.
It was the Roman arena.
I had been puzzled by the lack of horses, and now realised that the besiegers’ beasts must have been placed in the arena rather than in one of the thin-hedged paddocks to the east. The vast building lay outside the city’s south-eastern corner, close to the river, and was a great circle of stone inside which banks of seats surrounded an open space where the Romans had enjoyed savage displays featuring warriors and fearsome animals. The arena’s central space, ringed by a stone wall, made it a safe, even an ideal, place for horses. We had been riding towards the tents, thinking to trap the rebel leaders, but now I shouted at my men to spur towards the great stone arena instead.
The Romans had puzzled me when I was a child. Father Beocca, who was my tutor and was supposed to turn me into a good little Christian, praised Rome for being the home of the Holy Father, the Pope. The Romans, he said, had brought the gospel to Britain, and Constantine, the first Christian to rule Rome, had declared himself emperor in our own Northumbria. None of that inclined me to like Rome or the Romans, but that changed when I was seven or eight years old and Beocca walked me into the arena at Eoferwic. I had stared amazed at the tiers of stone seats climbing all around me to the outer wall where men were using hammers and crowbars to loosen masonry blocks that would be used to make new buildings in the growing city. Ivy crawled up the seats, saplings sprang from cracks in the stone, while the arena itself was thick with grass. ‘This space,’ Father Beocca told me in a hushed voice, ‘is sacred.’
‘Because Jesus was here?’ I remember asking.
Father Beocca hit me around the head. ‘Don’t be stupid, boy. Our lord never left the holy land.’
‘I thought you told me he went to Egypt once?’
He hit me again to cover his embarrassment at being corrected. He was not an unkind man, indeed I loved Beocca even though I took a delight in mocking him, and he was easy to mock because he was ugly and crippled. That was unkind, but I was a child, and children are cruel beasts. In time I came to recognise Beocca’s honesty and strength, while King Alfred, who was no one’s fool, valued the man highly. ‘No, boy,’ Beocca went on that day in Eoferwic, ‘this place is sacred because Christians suffered for their faith here.’
I smelled a good story. ‘Suffered, father?’ I had asked earnestly.
‘They were put to death in horrible ways, horrible!’
‘How, father?’ I had asked, hiding my eagerness.
‘Some were fed to wild beasts, some were crucified like our Lord, others were burned to death. Women, men, even children. Their screams sanctify this space.’ He had made the sign of the cross. ‘The Romans were cruel until they saw the light of Christ.’
‘And then they stopped being cruel, father?’
‘They became Christians,’ he had answered evasively.
‘Is that why they lost their lands?’
He had hit me again, though not forcefully nor angrily, yet he had sown a seed in me. The Romans! As a child it was their force that impressed me. They were from so far away, yet they had conquered our land. It was not ours then, of course, but it was still a far land. They were winners and fighters, they were heroes to a child, and Beocca’s disdain made them only more heroic to me. At that time, before my father’s death and before Ragnar the Dane adopted me, I thought I was a Christian, but I never had a fantasy of becoming a Christian hero by facing a wild beast in Eoferwic’s decaying arena. Instead, I dreamed of fighting in that arena, and saw myself placing a foot on the bloodied chest of a fallen warrior as thousands cheered me. I was a child.
Now, old and grey-bearded, I still admire the Romans. How could I not? We could not build an arena, nor make ramparts like those that surrounded Ceaster. Our roads were muddy tracks, theirs were stone-edged and spear-straight. They built temples of marble, we made churches of timber. Our floors were beaten earth and rushes, theirs were marvels of intricate tilework. They had laced the land with wonders, and we, who had taken the land, could only watch the wonders decay, or patch them with wattle and thatch. True, they were a cruel people, but so are we. Life is cruel.
I was suddenly aware of shrieks coming from the city’s ramparts. I looked to my right and saw helmeted warriors running on the wall’s top. They were keeping pace with us as best they could, and cheering us on. The shrieks sounded like women, but I could only see men there, one of them waving a spear over his head as if encouraging us to kill. I lifted my spear to him, and the man responded by jumping up and down. He had ribbons, white and red, attached to the crown of his helmet. He screeched something at me, but he was too far away, and I could not catch his words, only sense that he was celebrating.
No wonder the garrison was happy. Their enemy had crumpled, and the siege was lifted, even if most of Cynlæf’s troops were still in their encampment. But those troops had shown no lust to fight. They had run or hidden in their shelters. Only the household troops opposed us, and they were now fleeing towards the dubious safety of the old arena. We caught a few laggards, spearing them in the back as they stumbled southwards, while others, more sensible, threw down their weapons and knelt in abject surrender. The light was fading now. The reddish stone of the arena reflected the flames of the nearest campfires, giving the masonry the appearance of being washed in blood. I curbed Tintreg by the arena’s entrance as my men, grinning and elated, reined in around me.
‘There’s only this one way in?’ Finan asked me.
‘As I remember, yes, but send a half-dozen men around the back to make sure.’
The one way in was an arched tunnel that led beneath the tiered seats into the arena itself, and in the fading light I could see men pushing a cart to make a barricade at the tunnel’s far end. They watched us fearfully, but I made no move to attack them. They were fools, and, like fools, they were doomed.
Doomed because they had trapped themselves. It was true there were other entrances to the arena, but those entrances, which were evenly spaced about the whole building, only led to the tiered seating, not to the fighting space at the arena’s centre. Cynlæf’s men had kept their horses in the arena, and that made sense, but in their desperation to escape they had fled to the horses, and so found themselves ringed by stone with just one way to escape, and my men guarded that one tunnel.
Vidarr Leifson, one of my Norse warriors, had led horsemen around the whole arena and returned to confirm that there was just the one entrance to the fighting level. ‘So what do we do, lord?’ he asked, twisting in his saddle to peer into the tunnel. His breath clouded in the cold evening air.
‘We let them rot.’
‘Can they climb up to the seats?’ Berg asked.
‘Probably.’ There was a wall a little higher than a tall man that prevented wild beasts from leaping up to maul the spectators, so our enemy could scramble up to the seats and try to escape through one of the stairways, but that meant abandoning their precious horses, and, once out of the building, they would still have to fight past my men. ‘So block every entrance,’ I ordered, ‘and light fires just outside every stairway.’ The barricades would slow any attempt by Cynlæf’s men to escape, and the fires would warm my sentries.
‘Where do we get firewood?’ Godric asked. He was young, a Saxon, and had once been my servant.
‘The barricade, you fool,’ Finan said, pointing to the besiegers’