‘Thorstein protected these folk, lord,’ Heahberht told me.
‘But he didn’t protect Thunresleam?’
‘These are Thorstein’s people, lord. They belong to him. They work his land.’
‘So who’s the Lord of Thunresleam?’
‘Whoever is in the fort,’ he said bitterly. ‘This way, lord.’ He led me past a duck pond and into a thicket of bushes where a small cottage, thatched so deep that it looked more like a pile of straw than a dwelling, stood in the trees’ shadows. ‘The man is called Brun, lord.’
‘Brun?’
‘Just Brun. Some say he’s mad, lord.’
Brun crawled from his cottage. He had to crawl to get beneath the thatch’s edge. He half stood, saw my mail coat and golden arm rings, and fell back to his knees and scrabbled with dirt-crusted hands in the earth. He mumbled something I did not hear. A woman then emerged from beneath the thatch and knelt beside Brun and the two of them made whimpering noises as they bobbed their heads. Their hair was long, matted and tangled. Father Heahberht told them what we wanted and Brun grunted something, then abruptly stood. He was a tiny man, no taller than the dwarves that are said to live underground. His hair was so thick that I could not see his eyes. He pulled his woman to her feet, and she was no taller than him and certainly no prettier, then the pair of them gabbled at Heahberht, but their speech was so garbled that I could hardly understand a word. ‘He says we must go to the back of the house,’ Heahberht said.
‘You can understand them?’
‘Well enough, lord.’
I left my escort in the lane, tied our two horses to a hornbeam, then followed the diminutive couple through thick weeds to where, half hidden by grass, was what I sought. Rows of hives. Bees were busy in the warm air, but they ignored us, going to and from the cone-shaped hives that appeared to be fashioned from baked mud. Brun, a sudden fondness in his voice, was stroking one hive. ‘He says the bees talk to him, lord,’ Heahberht told me, ‘and he talks back.’
Bees crawled up Brun’s bare arms and he muttered to them. ‘What do they tell him?’ I asked.
‘What happens in the world, lord. And he tells them he’s sorry.’
‘For the world’s happenings?’
‘Because to get the honey for the mead, lord, he must break the hives open, and then the bees die. He buries them, he says, and says prayers over their graves.’
Brun was crooning at his bees, singing like a mother to her infants. ‘I’ve only seen straw hives,’ I said, ‘maybe straw hives don’t need to be broken? Maybe the bees can live?’
Brun must have understood what I said for he turned angrily and spoke fast. ‘He doesn’t approve of skeps, lord,’ Heahberht translated, speaking of the woven straw hives. ‘He makes his hives the old-fashioned way, out of plaited hazel twigs and cow dung. He says the honey is sweeter.’
‘Tell him what I want,’ I said, ‘and tell him I’ll pay well.’
And so the bargain was struck and I rode back to the old fort on the hill and thought there was a chance. Just a chance. Because the bees had spoken.
That night, and the following two nights, I sent men down the long hill to the new fort. I led them the first two nights, leaving the old fort after dark. Men carried the sails, which had been cut into two, then each half sewn to a pair of spars so that we had six wide rope ladders. When we attacked in earnest we would have to go into the creek, unfurl the six wide ladders and lay them against the farther bank, then men would have to climb the latticed ropes carrying real ladders that must be laid against the wall.
But for three nights we just feigned attacks. We went close to the moat, we shouted and our archers, of whom we had just over a hundred, shot arrows at the Danes. They, in turn, shot arrows back and hurled spears that thumped into the mud. They also threw firebrands to light the night and, when they saw we were not attempting to cross the moat, I heard men shouting orders to stop throwing the spears.
I learned the walls were well-manned. Haesten had left a large garrison, so many that some Danes were not needed in the fort at all, but instead guarded the ships drawn up on Caninga’s shore.
I did not go down the hill on the third night. I let Steapa lead that feint while I watched from the high fort’s walls. Just after dark my men brought a wagon from Hocheleia and in it were eight hives. Brun had told us that the best time to seal a hive was at dusk, and that evening he had closed up the entrances with plugs of mud mixed with cow dung that now slowly hardened. I put my ear next to one hive and heard a strange humming vibration.
‘The bees will live till tomorrow night?’ Edward asked me.
‘They don’t have to,’ I said, ‘because we’re attacking in tomorrow’s dawn.’
‘Tomorrow!’ he said, unable to hide his surprise, which pleased me. By making feint attacks during the early darkness I wanted to persuade the Danes that we would be launching our real attack shortly after dusk. Instead I would go at them at daybreak next morning, but I hoped that Skade and her men were already convinced, like Edward, that I planned an attack at nightfall.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ I said, ‘and we leave tonight, in the dark.’
‘Tonight?’ Edward asked, still astonished.
‘Tonight.’
He made the sign of the cross. Æthelflæd who, with Steapa, was the only other person I had told of my plans, came to stand beside me and put her hand through my arm. Edward seemed to shiver at the sight of our affection, then forced a smile. ‘Pray for me, sister,’ he said.
‘I always have,’ she replied.
She looked at him steadily and he met her gaze for an instant, then looked at me. He started to speak, but nervousness made the first word an incoherent croak. He tried again. ‘You would not give me your oath, Lord Uhtred,’ he said.
‘No, lord.’
‘But my sister has it?’
Æthelflæd’s arm tightened on mine. ‘She has my sworn loyalty, lord,’ I said.
‘Then I have no need of your oath,’ Edward said with a smile.
That was generous of him and I bowed in acknowledgement. ‘You don’t need my oath, lord,’ I said, ‘but your men need your encouragement tonight. Speak to them. Inspire them.’
There would be little sleep that night. It took men time to prepare for battle. It was a time of fear, a time when the imagination makes the enemy seem ever more fearsome. Some men, a few, fled the fort and sought shelter in the woods, but they were very few. The rest sharpened swords and axes. I would not let men feed the fires, because I did not want the Danes to see anything different about this night, and so most weapons were honed in the dark. Men pulled on boots, mail and helmets. They made poor jokes. Some just sat with bowed heads, but they listened when Edward spoke to them. He went from group to group and I remembered how uninspiring his father’s first speech had been before the great victory at Ethandun. Edward was not much better, but he had an earnestness that was convincing, and men murmured approval when he promised that he would be the first man in the attack.
‘You must keep him alive,’ Father Coenwulf told me sternly.
‘Isn’t that the responsibility of your god?’ I asked.
‘His father will never forgive you if Edward dies.’
‘He has another son,’ I said flippantly.
‘Edward is a good man,’ Coenwulf said angrily, ‘and he’ll make a good king.’
I agreed with that. I had not thought so before, but I had begun to like Edward. He had a willingness about him, and I did not doubt he would prove brave. He feared, of course, like all men fear, but he had kept those fears behind the fence of his teeth. He was determined to prove himself an heir, and that meant going to the place of death. He had not baulked at that idea, and for that I respected him. ‘He’ll make a good king,’ I told Coenwulf, ‘if he proves himself. And you know he must prove himself.’
The priest paused, then nodded. ‘But look after him,’ he pleaded.
‘I’ve told Steapa to look after him,’ I told Co
enwulf, ‘and I can’t do better than that.’
Father Pyrlig, dressed in his rusted mail, a sword at his waist and with an axe and a shield slung from his shoulders, came from the dark. ‘My men are ready,’ he said. I had given him thirty men whose job was to carry the hives down the dark hill and across the moat.
I looked eastwards. There was no sign of any new light there, but I sensed the short night was coming to its close. I touched Thor’s hammer. ‘Time to go,’ I said.
Steapa’s men were making a racket at the hill’s foot, a noise to distract the Danes as hundreds of men now left the fort and, in the clouded darkness, went down the steep slope. In front were Edward’s men carrying the ladders. I saw the torches flaring at the moat’s edge and the flicker of arrow feathers whipping up towards the ramparts. The air smelt of salt and shellfish. I thought of Æthelflæd’s farewell kiss, of her sudden and impetuous embrace, and the fears surged in me. It sounded simple. Cross a moat, place the ladders on the small muddy ledge between moat and wall, climb the ladders. Die.
There was no order to our advance. Men found their own way down the hill and their leaders called softly to assemble them where the charred ruins of the village offered some small concealment. We were close enough to hear the Danes jeering as Steapa’s men withdrew. The torches that had been thrown to illuminate the ditch smouldered low. Now, I hoped, the Danes would stand down. Men would go to their beds and to their women, while we waited in the dark where we touched our weapons and our amulets and listened to the ripple of water as the tide drained from the wide marshes. Weohstan was out in the tussocked swamps and I had ordered him to display his men to the fort’s west in hope that some defenders would be drawn that way. I had two hundred other men to the east, ready to attack the beached ships at the creek’s farther end. Those men were commanded by Finan. I did not like losing Finan as my shield-neighbour, but I needed a warrior to seal the Danish escape, and there was no man so fierce in battle, nor so clear-headed, as the Irishman.
But neither Weohstan nor Finan could show themselves till dawn. Nothing could happen till dawn. There was a slight drizzle coming cold on a west wind. Priests were praying. Osferth’s men, carrying the furled sails, crouched among tall nettles at the edge of the village, just a hundred paces from the moat’s nearer bank. I waited with Osferth, a yard or so in front of Edward who spoke not a word, but just clutched the golden cross that hung at his neck. Steapa had found us and waited with the Ætheling. My helmet was cold on my ears and neck, and my mail coat felt clammy.
I heard Danes speaking. They had sent men to collect the spears after each of our feint attacks, and I supposed that was what they were now doing in the small light of the dying torches. Then I saw them, just shadows in shadows, and I knew the dawn was almost upon us as the grey light of death spread behind us like a stain on the world’s rim. I turned to Edward. ‘Now, lord,’ I said to him.
He stood, a young man at battle’s edge. For a heartbeat he could not find his voice, then he drew his long sword. ‘For God and for Wessex,’ he shouted, ‘come with me!’
And so the fight for Beamfleot began.
For a moment everything is as you imagined it, then it changes, and the details stand out so stark. Details of irrelevant things. Perhaps it is the knowledge that these small things may be the last you will ever see in this life that makes them so memorable. I recall a star flickering like a guttering candle between the clouds to the west, the clatter of arrows in the wooden quiver of a running archer, the shine of wolf-light on the Temes to the south, the pale feathers of all the arrows lodged ragged in the fort’s wooden wall, and the loose links of Steapa’s mail jangling and dangling from the hem of his coat as he ran to Edward’s right. I remember a black and white dog running with us, a frayed rope knotted about his neck. It seemed to me we ran in silence, but it could not have been silent. Eight hundred men were running towards the fort as the sun touched the earth’s rim with silver.
‘Archers!’ Beornoth shouted, ‘archers! To me!’
A few Danes were still collecting spears. One watched us in disbelief, his arms clutching a bundle of ash shafts, then he panicked, dropped the weapons and ran. A horn sounded from the ramparts.
We had divided our men into troops, and each one had a purpose and a leader. Beornoth commanded the archers who assembled on our left, immediately in front of the bridge pilings that stood gaunt in the moat. Those archers were to harass the Danes on the ramparts, to pour arrows at them, to force them to duck as they tried to repel us with spears, axes and swords. Osferth commanded the fifty men whose job was to place the sailcloth ladders in the moat, and behind him came Egwin, a veteran West Saxon, whose one hundred men would carry the climbing ladders to the wall. The rest of the troops were to make the assault. As soon as the ladder carriers were across the moat the attacking troops were to follow, climb the ladders and trust in whatever god they had prayed to through the night. I had ordered the men into troops, and Alfred, who loved lists and order, would have approved, but I knew how soon such careful plans collapsed under the shock of reality.
The horn was challenging the dawn and the fort’s defenders were appearing on the ramparts. The men who had been collecting spears climbed the moat’s far side with the help of a rope lashed to a piling by the fort’s entrance, but one of them had the sense to slash through the rope before running into the fort. The great gates closed behind him. Our archers were shooting, but I knew their arrows would do small damage against mail coats and steel helmets. Yet it would force the Danes to use shields. It would cumber them, and then I saw Osferth’s men vanish into the moat and I bellowed at the following troops to wait. ‘Stop and wait!’ The last thing I needed was a mass of men trapped in the moat’s bed, churning about under a hail of spears and impeding Osferth’s men. Better to let those men do their job and Egwin’s after them.
The bottom of the moat had sharpened stakes hidden beneath the low water, but Osferth’s men found them easy enough to haul from the soft mud. The latticed sails were unrolled on the opposite bank and their spars were anchored by spears that were thrust deep into the mud. A bucket of burning charcoal was thrown from the ramparts. I saw the bright fire fall then die in the wet muck below. The fire hurt no one and I suspected a Dane had panicked and emptied the pail too early. The dog was barking at the moat’s edge. ‘Ladders!’ Osferth bellowed, and Egwin’s men charged forward as Osferth’s warriors hurled spears up at the high wall. I watched approvingly as the ladder carriers scaled the steep moat bank, then shouted for the assault troops to follow me to the newly placed ladders.
Except it was not like that. I try to tell folk what a battle is like, and the telling comes out halting and lame. After a battle, when the fear has subsided, we exchange stories and out of all those tales we make a pattern of the fight, but in battle it is all confusion. Yes, we did cross the moat, and the rope netting of the spread sails worked, at least for a while, and the ladders reached the Danish wall, but I have left out so much. The welter of men thrashing in the ebbing tide, the fall of heavy spears, blood dark in dark water, screams, the sense of not knowing what happened, of desperation, of hearing the solid thumps of blades hurled from the parapet, the smaller sounds of arrows striking home, the shouts of men who did not know what was happening, men who feared death, men who bellowed at other men to bring ladders or to haul a spar back up the muddy bank. And then there was the mud as thick as hoof glue and just as sticky. Slick and slippery mud, men covered in mud and streaked with blood and dying in mud and always the Danes shrieking insults from the sky. The screams of men dying. Men calling for help, crying for their mothers, weeping on their way to the grave.
In the end it is the small things that win a battle. You can throw thousands of men against a wall, and most will fail, or they will cower beyond the ditch, or crouch in the water, and it is the few, the brave and the desperate, who fight through their fear. I watched a man carry a ladder and slam it against the wall and climb with a drawn sword, and a Dane p
oised his heavy spear and waited. I shouted a warning, but then the spear was driven straight down and the blade cut through the helmet and the man shook on the ladder and fell backwards, blood sudden in the dawn and a second man thrust him out of the way, screamed defiance as he climbed and slashed a long-hafted axe at the spearman. At that moment, as the sun flooded the new day, it was all chaos. I had done my best to order the attack, but the troops were now mixed together. Some were standing up to their waists in the moat’s water, and all were helpless because we could not get the ladders to stay against the wall. The Danes, though they were dazzled by the new sun, were knocking the ladders aside with their heavy war axes. Some ladders, their rungs made from green wood, broke, yet still brave men tried to climb the high palisade. One of the sailcloth ladders slid back and I watched men drag it back into place as the spears fell about them. More fire was thrown from the ramparts, the flare of it lighting helmets and blades, but men extinguished the embers by rolling in mud. Spears thudded into shields.
I picked up a fallen ladder and threw it against the wall and climbed, but a man cannot climb a ladder holding sword and shield, so my shield was slung on my back and I had to snatch at the rungs one by one with my left hand while holding Serpent-Breath in my right and a Dane caught hold of her blade with a gloved hand and tried to pull her from my grasp, and I ripped her backwards and lost my balance and fell onto a corpse, and then Edward began to climb the same ladder. He wore a helmet circled with gold and surmounted by a plume of swan’s feathers that made him a target and I could see the Danes waiting to snatch him over the rampart so they could take his fine armour, but then Steapa knocked the ladder sideways so that the Ætheling fell into the mud.
‘Dear God,’ I heard Edward say in a mild voice, as though he had spilt some milk or ale, and that made me laugh. The handle of a thrown axe banged on my helmet. I turned, picked up the weapon and slung it at the faces above me, but it went wide. Father Coenwulf helped Edward to his feet. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ I snarled at the priest, but he ignored me. He was a brave man for he wore no armour and carried no weapons. Steapa covered Edward with his huge shield as the spears hurtled down. Somehow Father Coenwulf survived the blades. He held a crucifix towards the jeering Danes and shouted a curse at them.
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