“Oars!” I heard a huge shout.
An ax buried itself in my shield, splitting the wood apart, and I saw a man with mad eyes staring at me as he tried to retrieve his blade. I pushed the shield wide and lunged Serpent-Breath at his chest, using all my force so that her steel went through his mail and he went on staring at me as the sword found his heart.
“Oars!” It was Ralla, shouting at those of my men who no longer had to defend themselves against Haesten’s attackers. “Oars, you bastards,” he shouted, and I thought he must be mad to try and row a sinking ship.
But Ralla was not mad. He was thinking sensibly. Sea-Eagle was sinking, but Dragon-Voyager was floating, and Dragon-Voyager’s bows were pointing to the open estuary. But Ralla had splintered one bank of her oars and now he forced some of my men to carry Sea-Eagle’s oars across the gap. He was planning to take Haesten’s ship.
Except the Dragon-Voyager was now a maelstrom of desperate men. Sigefrid’s crew had crossed Sea-Eagle’s sinking bows to gain a lodgment on the steering platform above Æthelflaed and from there they were hacking at Haesten’s men, who were being pushed back by my companions and by Erik’s crew, who fought with a maniacal fury. Erik had no shield, just his long-sword, and I thought he must die a dozen times as he hurled himself on his enemies, but the gods loved him at that moment and Erik lived while his enemies died. And still more of Sigefrid’s men came from the stern so that Haesten and his crew were squeezed between us.
“Haesten!” I shouted, “come and die!”
He saw me, and looked astonished, but whether he heard me, I do not know, for Haesten wanted to live to fight again. Dragon-Voyager was floating, but in water so shallow that I could feel her keel bumping on the mud, and behind her were more of Haesten’s ships. He jumped overboard, landing in the knee-deep water, and his crew followed, running down Caninga’s bank to the safety of their next ship. The fighting, that had been so furious, died in an eyeblink.
“I have the bitch!” Sigefrid shouted. He had somehow boarded Haesten’s ship. His men had not carried him, for his chair with its lifting poles was still on the ship that had sunk Sea-Eagle, but the massive strength in Sigefrid’s arms had hauled him across the sinking boat and up into Dragon-Voyager, and now he lay on useless legs, a sword in one hand and Æthelflaed’s unbound hair in his other.
His men grinned. They had won. They had retrieved the prize.
Sigefrid smiled at his brother. “I have the bitch,” he said again.
“Give her to me,” Erik said.
“We’ll take her back,” Sigefrid said, still not understanding.
Æthelflaed was staring at Erik. She had been wrenched down to the deck, her golden hair in Sigefrid’s huge hand.
“Give her to me,” Erik said again.
I will not say there was silence. There could not have been silence for the battle still raged along the line of Haesten’s ships, and the fires roared and the wounded moaned, but it seemed like silence, and Sigefrid’s eyes looked along the line of Erik’s men and settled on me. I was taller than the others, and though my back was to the rising sun, he must have seen something he recognized for he lifted his sword to point the blade at me. “Take off the helmet,” he ordered in his curiously high voice.
“I am not your man to be commanded,” I said.
I still had some of Sigefrid’s men with me, the same men who had come from the blocking ship to thwart Haesten’s first attempt to open the channel, and those men now turned toward me with weapons rising, but Finan was also there, and with him were my household troops.
“Don’t kill them,” I said, “just drop them overboard. They fought beside me.”
Sigefrid let go of Æthelflaed’s hair, shoving her back toward his men, and heaved his huge, black-swathed cripple’s body forward. “You and the Saxon, eh?” he said to Erik. “You and that treacherous Saxon? You betray me, brother?”
“I will pay your share of the ransom,” Erik said.
“You? Pay? In what? Piss?”
“I will pay the ransom,” Erik insisted.
“You couldn’t pay a goat to lick the sweat off your balls!” Sigefrid bellowed. “Take her ashore!” This last command was to his men.
And Erik charged. He did not need to. There was no way that Sigefrid’s men could take Æthelflaed ashore for the Dragon-Voyager had been carried by the incoming tide past the half-sunken Sea-Eagle and now we were drifting down onto Haesten’s next boats, and I feared we would be boarded any minute. Ralla had the same fear and was dragging some of my men to the forward rowers’ benches. “Pull,” he shouted, “pull!”
And Erik charged, meaning to cut down the men who now held Æthelflaed, and he had to pass his brother who squatted dark and angry on the blood-slicked deck, and I saw Sigefrid lift the sword and saw Erik’s look of astonishment that his own brother would raise a blade against him, and I heard Æthelflaed’s scream as her lover ran onto Fear-Giver. Sigefrid’s face showed nothing, neither rage nor sorrow. He held the sword as his brother folded on the blade, and then, without an order, the rest of us charged. Erik’s men and my men, shoulder to shoulder, went to start the killing again and I paused only long enough to seize one of my warriors by the shoulder. “Keep Sigefrid alive,” I ordered him, and never saw who it was, then carried Serpent-Breath to the last slaughter of that bloody morning.
Sigefrid’s men died fast. There were few of them and many of us. They stood for a moment, meeting our rush with a locked shield wall, but we came with a fury born of bitter anger and Serpent-Breath sang like a screaming gull. I had thrown down my shield, wanting only to hack into these men, and my first stroke beat down a shield and sliced off the jaw of a man who tried to scream and only spat blood as Sihtric drove a blade into the open red maw of his mouth. The shield wall broke under our fury. Erik’s men fought to avenge their lord, and my men fought for Æthelflaed who crouched, arms over her head, as Sigefrid’s men died around her. She was shrieking, screaming inconsolably like a woman at the burial of the dead, and perhaps that was what kept her alive because, in that slaughter on the Dragon-Voyager’s stern, men feared those awful shrieks. The noise was terrifying, overwhelming, a sadness to fill the world, and it went on even after the last of Sigefrid’s men had leaped overboard to escape our swords and axes.
And only Sigefrid remained, and the Dragon-Voyager was under way, pulling against the tide to creep out of the channel under her few oars.
I draped my blood-soaked cloak over Æthelflaed’s shoulders. The ship was moving faster as Ralla’s oarsmen found their rhythm and as more men, dropping shields and weapons, snatched up the long oars and fitted them through the holes in Dragon-Voyager’s flanks. “Row!” Ralla called as he came down the blood-slopping deck to take the steering-oar. “Row!”
Sigefrid remained and Sigefrid lived. He was on the deck, his useless legs curled beneath him, his sword hand empty, and with a blade held at his throat. Osferth, Alfred’s son, held that sword, and he looked at me nervously. Sigefrid was cursing and spitting. His brother’s body, with Fear-Giver still piercing the belly, lay beside him. Small waves broke on Caninga’s point as the new tide raced across the wide mudflats.
I went to stand over Sigefrid. I stared down at him, not hearing his insults. I looked at Erik’s corpse and thought that was a man I could have loved, could have fought beside, could have known like a brother, and then I looked at Osferth’s face, so like his father’s. “I told you once,” I said, “that killing a cripple was no way to make a reputation.”
“Yes, lord,” he said.
“I was wrong,” I said, “kill him.”
“Give me my sword!” Sigefrid demanded.
Osferth hesitated as I looked back to the Norseman. “I will spend my life beyond death,” I told him, “in Odin’s hall. And there I shall feast with your brother, and neither he nor I wishes your company.”
“Give me my sword!” Sigefrid was pleading now. He reached for Fear-Giver’s hilt, but I kicked his hand away from Er
ik’s corpse. “Kill him,” I told Osferth.
We dropped Sigefrid Thurgilson overboard somewhere on the sun-dancing sea beyond Caninga, then turned westward so that the flooding tide could carry us upriver. Haesten had managed to board another of his ships and, for a time, he pursued us, but we had the longer and faster boat, and we drew away from him and, after a time, his ships abandoned the chase and the smoke of Beamfleot receded until it looked like a long low cloud. And Æthelflaed still wept.
“What do we do?” a man asked me. He was one of Erik’s men, the leader now of the twenty-two survivors who had escaped with us.
“Whatever you wish,” I said.
“We hear that your king hangs all Northmen,” the man said.
“Then he will hang me first,” I said. “You will live,” I promised him, “and in Lundene I shall give you a ship and you may go wherever you want.” I smiled. “You can even stay and serve me.”
Those men had laid Erik’s body reverently on a cloak. They pulled Sigefrid’s sword from their lord’s belly and gave it to me, and I in turn handed it to Osferth. “You earned it,” I said, and so he had, for in that welter of death Alfred’s son had fought like a man. Erik held his own sword in his dead hand and I thought he would already be at the feasting hall, waiting for me.
I took Æthelflaed away from her lover’s corpse and led her to the stern and there I held her as she cried in my arms. Her golden hair brushed my beard. She clung to me and cried till she had no more tears, and then she whimpered and hid her face against my bloody mail coat.
“The king will be pleased with us,” Finan said.
“Yes,” I said, “he will.” No ransom would be paid. Wessex was safe. The Northmen had fought and killed each other, and their ships were burning and their dreams were ashes.
I felt Æthelflaed’s body shaking against mine and I stared eastward to where the sun dazzled above the smoke of burning Beamfleot. “You’re taking me back to Æthelred, aren’t you?” she said accusingly.
“I’m taking you to your father,” I said. “Where else can I take you?” She did not answer because she knew there was no choice. Wyrd bi? ful ãræd. “And no one must ever know,” I went on quietly, “about you and Erik.”
Again she did not answer, but now she could not answer. She was sobbing too heavily and I held my arms around her as though I could hide her from the watching men and from the world and from the husband who awaited her.
The long oars dipped, the riverbanks closed on us, and in the west the smoke of Lundene smudged the summer sky.
As I took Æthelflaed home.
HISTORICAL NOTE
There is more fiction in Sword Song than in the previous novels about Uhtred of Bebbanburg. If Æthelflaed ever was captured by the Vikings then the chroniclers were curiously silent about the incident, so that strand of the story is my invention. What is true is that Alfred’s eldest daughter did marry Æthelred of Mercia, and there is a good deal of evidence that the marriage was not made in heaven. I suspect I have been extremely unfair to the real Æthelred, but fairness is not the historical novelist’s first duty.
The records of Alfred’s reign are comparatively rich, partly because the king was a scholar and wanted such records kept, but even so there are mysteries. We know that his forces captured London, but there is controversy over the exact year in which that city was essentially incorporated into Wessex. Legally it remained in Mercia, but Alfred was an ambitious man, and he was evidently determined to keep kingless Mercia subservient to Wessex. With the capture of Lundene he has begun the inexorable northward expansion that will eventually, after Alfred’s death, transmute the Saxon kingdom of Wessex into the land we know as England.
Much of the rest of the story is based on truth. There was a determined Viking attack on Rochester (Hrofeceastre) in Kent that ended in utter failure. That failure vindicated Alfred’s defensive policy of ringing Wessex with burhs that were fortified towns, permanently garrisoned by the fyrd. A Viking chieftain could still invade Wessex, but few Viking armies traveled with siege equipment, and any such invasion thus risked leaving a strong enemy in its rear. The burh system was immaculately organized, a reflection, I suspect, of Alfred’s own obsession with order, and we are fortunate to possess a sixteenth-century copy of an eleventh-century copy of the original document describing the burh’s organization. The Burghal Hildage, as the document is known, prescribes how many men would be needed in each burh, and how those men were to be raised, and it reflects an extraordinary defensive effort. Ancient ruined towns were revived and ramparts rebuilt. Alfred even planned some of those towns and, to this day, if you walk the streets of Wareham in Dorset or Wallingford in Oxford you are following the streets his surveyors laid out and passing property lines that have endured for twelve centuries.
If Alfred’s defensive scheme was a brilliant success, then his first efforts at offensive warfare were less remarkable. I have no evidence that Æthelred of Mercia led the fleet that attacked the Danes in the River Stour, indeed I doubt that foray was any of Æthelred’s business, but other than that the tale is essentially true and the expedition, after its initial success, was overwhelmed by the Vikings. Nor do I have a shred of evidence that Æthelred ever subjected his young wife to the ordeal of bitter water, but anyone fascinated by such ancient and malicious sorcery can find God’s instructions for the ceremony in the Old Testament (Numbers 5).
Alfred the Great, as Sword Song ends, still has some years to reign, Æthelflaed of Mercia has glory to find, and Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a fictional character, though based on a real man who happens to be one of my paternal ancestors, has a long road to travel. England, in the late ninth century, is still a dream in the minds of a few visionaries. Yet dreams, as the more fortunate of my characters discover, can come true, and so Uhtred and his story will continue.
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Sword Song s-4 Page 33
