Sword Song s-4

by Bernard Cornwell

  Except my spies, for I employed a dozen in Northumbria, had told me what my uncle had done to my fortress. He had closed the landside gates. He had taken them away altogether and in their place were ramparts, newly built, high and reinforced with stone, and now, if a man wished to get inside the fortress, he needed to follow a path that led to the northern end of the crag on which the fortress stood. And every step of that path would be under those high walls, under attack, and then, at the northern end, where the sea broke and sucked, there was a small gate. Beyond that gate was a steep path leading to another wall and another gate. Bebbanburg had been sealed, and to take it I would need an army beyond even the reach of my hoarded silver.

  “Be lucky!” a woman’s voice startled me from my thoughts. The folk of the old city were awake and they saw us pass and took us for Danes because I had ordered my men to hide their crosses.

  “Kill the Saxon bastards!” another voice shouted.

  Our footsteps echoed from the high houses that were all at least three stories tall. Some had beautiful stonework over their bricks and I thought how the world had once been filled with these houses. I remember the first time I ever climbed a Roman staircase, and how odd it felt, and I knew that in times gone by men must have taken such things for granted. Now the world was dung and straw and damp-ridden wood. We had stone masons, of course, but it was quicker to build from wood, and the wood rotted, but no one seemed to care. The whole world rotted as we slid from light into darkness, getting ever nearer to the black chaos in which this middle world would end and the gods would fight and all love and light and laughter would dissolve. “Thirty years,” I said aloud.

  “Is that how old you are?” Father Pyrlig asked me.

  “It’s how long a hall lasts,” I said, “unless you keep repairing it. Our world is falling apart, father.”

  “My God, you’re gloomy,” Pyrlig said, amused.

  “And I watch Alfred,” I went on, “and see how he tries to tidy our world. Lists! Lists and parchment! He’s like a man putting wattle hurdles in the face of a flood.”

  “Brace a hurdle well,” Steapa was listening to our conversation and now intervened, “and it’ll turn a stream.”

  “And better to fight a flood than drown in it,” Pyrlig commented.

  “Look at that!” I said, pointing to the carved stone head of a beast that was fixed to a brick wall. The beast was like none I had ever seen, a shaggy great cat, and its open mouth was poised above a chipped stone basin suggesting that water had once flowed from mouth to bowl. “Could we make that?” I asked bitterly.

  “There are craftsmen who can make such things,” Pyrlig said.

  “Then where are they?” I demanded angrily, and I thought that all these things, the carvings and bricks and marble, had been made before Pyrlig’s religion came to the island. Was that the reason for the world’s decay? Were the true gods punishing us because so many men worshipped the nailed god? I did not make the suggestion to Pyrlig, but kept silent. The houses loomed above us, except where one had collapsed into a heap of rubble. A dog rooted along a wall, stopped to cock its leg, then turned a snarl on us. A baby cried in a house. Our footsteps echoed from the walls. Most of my men were silent, wary of the ghosts they believed inhabited these relics of an older time.

  The baby wailed again, louder. “Be a young mother in there,” Rypere said happily. Rypere was his nickname and meant “thief,” and he was a skinny Angle from the north, clever and sly, and he at least was not thinking of ghosts.

  “I should stick to goats, if I were you,” Clapa said, “they don’t mind your stink.” Clapa was a Dane, one who had taken an oath to me and served me loyally. He was a hulking great boy raised on a farm, strong as an ox, ever cheerful. He and Rypere were friends who never stopped goading each other.

  “Quiet!” I said before Rypere could make a retort. I knew we had to be getting close to the western walls. At the place where we had come ashore, the city climbed the wide terraced hill to the palace at the top, but that hill was flattening now, which meant we were nearing the valley of the Fleot. Behind us the sky was lightening to morning and I knew Æthelred would think I had failed to make my feint attack just before the dawn and that belief, I feared, might have persuaded him to abandon his own assault. Perhaps he was already leading his men back to the island? In which case we would be alone, surrounded by our enemies, and doomed.

  “God help us,” Pyrlig suddenly said.

  I held up my hand to stop my men because, in front of us, in the last stretch of the street before it passed under the stone arch called Ludd’s Gate, was a crowd of men. Armed men. Men whose helmets, ax blades, and spear-points caught and reflected the dull light of the clouded and newly-risen sun.

  “God help us,” Pyrlig said again and made the sign of the cross. “There must be two hundred of them.”

  “More,” I said. There were so many men that they could not all stand in the street, forcing some into the alleyways on either side. All the men we could see were facing the gate, and that made me understand what the enemy was doing and my mind cleared at that instant as if a fog had lifted. There was a courtyard to my left and I pointed through its gateway. “In there,” I ordered.

  I remember a priest, a clever fellow, visiting me to ask for my memories of Alfred, which he wanted to put in a book. He never did, because he died of the flux shortly after he saw me, but he was a shrewd man and more forgiving than most priests, and I recall how he asked me to describe the joy of battle. “My wife’s poets will tell you,” I said to him.

  “Your wife’s poets never fought,” he pointed out, “and they just take songs about other heroes and change the names.”

  “They do?”

  “Of course they do,” he had said, “wouldn’t you, lord?”

  I liked that priest and so I talked to him, and the answer I eventually gave him was that the joy of battle was the delight of tricking the other side. Of knowing what they will do before they do it, and having the response ready so that, when they make the move that is supposed to kill you, they die instead. And at that moment, in the damp gloom of the Lundene street, I knew what Sigefrid was doing and knew too, though he did not know it, that he was giving me Ludd’s Gate.

  The courtyard belonged to a stone-merchant. His quarries were Lundene’s Roman buildings and piles of dressed masonry were stacked against the walls ready to be shipped to Frankia. Still more stones were heaped against the gate that led through the river wall to the wharves. Sigefrid, I thought, must have feared an assault from the river and had blocked every gate through the walls west of the bridge, but he had never dreamed anyone would shoot the bridge to the unguarded eastern side. But we had, and my men were hidden in the courtyard while I stood in the entrance and watched the enemy throng at Ludd’s Gate.

  “We’re hiding?” Osferth asked me. His voice had a whine to it, as if he were perpetually complaining.

  “There are hundreds of men between us and the gate,” I explained patiently, “and we are too few to cut through them.”

  “So we failed,” he said, not as a question, but as a petulant statement.

  I wanted to hit him, but managed to stay patient. “Tell him,” I said to Pyrlig, “what is happening.”

  “God in his wisdom,” the Welshman explained, “has persuaded Sigefrid to lead an attack out of the city! They’re going to open that gate, boy, and stream across the marshes, and hack their way into Lord Æthelred’s men. And as most of Lord Æthelred’s men are from the fyrd, and most of Sigefrid’s are real warriors, then we all know what’s going to happen!” Father Pyrlig touched his mail coat where the wooden cross was hidden. “Thank you, God!”

  Osferth stared at the priest. “You mean,” he said after a pause, “that Lord Æthelred’s men will be slaughtered?”

  “Some of them are going to die!” Pyrlig allowed cheerfully, “and I hope to God they die in grace, boy, or they’ll never hear that heavenly choir, will they?”

  “I hate choir
s,” I growled.

  “No, you don’t,” Pyrlig said. “You see, boy,” he looked back to Osferth, “once they’ve gone out of the gate, then there’ll only be a handful of men guarding it. So that’s when we attack! And Sigefrid will suddenly find himself with an enemy in front and another one behind, and that predicament can make a man wish he’d stayed in bed.”

  A shutter opened in one of the high windows over the courtyard. A young woman stared out at the lightening sky, then stretched her hands high and yawned hugely. The gesture stretched her linen shift tight across her breasts, then she saw my men beneath her and instinctively clutched her arms to her chest. She was clothed, but must have felt naked. “Oh, thank you dear Savior for another sweet mercy,” Pyrlig said, watching her.

  “But if we take the gate,” Osferth said, worrying at the problems he saw, “the men left in the city will attack us.”

  “They will,” I agreed.

  “And Sigefrid…” he began.

  “Will probably turn back to slaughter us,” I finished his sentence for him.

  “So?” he said, then checked, because he saw nothing but blood and death in his future.

  “It all depends,” I said, “on my cousin. If he comes to our aid then we should win. If he doesn’t?” I shrugged, “then keep good hold of your sword.”

  A roar sounded from Ludd’s Gate and I knew it had been swung open and that men were streaming down the road that led to the Fleot. Æthelred, if he was still readying his assault, would see them coming and have a choice to make. He could stand and fight in the new Saxon town, or else run. I hoped he would stand. I did not like him, but I never saw a lack of courage in him. I did see a great deal of stupidity, which suggested he would probably welcome a fight.

  It took a long time for Sigefrid’s men to get through the gate. I watched from the shadows at the courtyard’s entrance and reckoned at least four hundred men were leaving the city. Æthelred had over three hundred good troops, most of them from Alfred’s household, but the rest of his force was from the fyrd and would never stand against a hard, savage attack. The advantage lay with Sigefrid whose men were warm, rested, and fed, while Æthelred’s troops had stumbled through the night and would be tired.

  “The sooner we do it,” I said to no one in particular, “the better.”

  “Go now, then?” Pyrlig suggested.

  “We just walk to the gate!” I shouted to my men. “You don’t run! Look as if you belong here!”

  Which is what we did.

  And so, with a stroll down a Lundene street, that bitter fight began.

  There were no more than thirty men left at Ludd’s Gate. Some were sentries posted to guard the archway, but most were idlers who had climbed to the rampart to watch Sigefrid’s sally. A big man with one leg was climbing the uneven stone steps on his crutches. He stopped halfway and turned to watch our approach. “If you hurry, lord,” he shouted to me, “you can join them!”

  He called me lord because he saw a lord. He saw a warrior lord.

  A handful of men could go to war as I did. They were chieftains, earls, kings, lords; the men who had killed enough other men to amass the fortune needed to buy mail, helmet, and weapons. And not just any mail. My coat was of Frankish make and would cost a man more than the price of a warship. Sihtric had polished the metal with sand so that it shone like silver. The hem of the coat was at my knees and was hung with thirty-eight hammers of Thor; some made of bone, some of ivory, some of silver, but all had once hung about the necks of brave enemies I had killed in battle, and I wore the amulets so that when I came to the corpse-hall the former owners would know me, greet me, and drink ale with me.

  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 wa
s 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!”