The Pale Horseman s-2

by Bernard Cornwell

  Pyrlig and I managed to get in front of the king and we stayed there, protecting him as we tried to climb that blood-fouled bank a third time. Pyrlig was screaming in his native tongue, I was cursing in Danish, and somehow we got halfway up and stayed on our feet, and someone, perhaps it was Alfred, was pushing me from behind. Rain hammered us, soaked us. A peal of thunder shook the heavens and I swung Serpent-Breath, trying to hack the Danish shields aside, then swung again, and the shock of the blade striking a shield boss jarred up my arm. A Dane, all beard and wide eyes, lunged a spear at me. I lunged back with the sword, shouted Iseult's name, tried to climb and the Spear-Dane slammed his spear forward again, and the blade struck my helmet's forehead and my head snapped back and another Dane hit me on the side of the head and all the world went drunken and dark. My feet slid and I was half aware of falling down into the ditch-water. Someone pulled me clear and dragged me back to the ditch's far side, and there I tried to stand, but fell again.

  The king. The king. He had to be protected and he had been in the ditch when I had last seen him, and I knew Alfred was no warrior. He was brave, but he did not love the slaughter as a warrior loves it.

  I tried to stand again, and this time succeeded, but blood squelched in my right boot and flowed over the boot-top when I put my weight on that leg. The ditch bottom was thick with dead and dying men, half drowned by the flood, but the living had fled from the ditch and the Danes were laughing at us.

  'To me!' I shouted. There had to be one last effort. Steapa and Pyrlig closed on me, and Eadric was there, and I was groggy and my head was filled with a ringing sound and my arm seemed feeble, but we had to make that last effort.

  'Where's the king?' I asked.

  'I threw him out of the ditch,' Pyrlig said.

  ‘Is he safe?'

  'I told the priests to hold him down. Told them to hit him if he tried to go again.'

  'One more attack,' I said. I did not want to make it. I did not want to clamber over the bodies in the ditch and try to climb that impossible wall, and I knew it was stupid, knew I would probably die if I went again, but we were warriors and warriors will not be beaten. It is reputation. It is pride. It is the madness of battle. I began beating Serpent-Breath against my half-broken shield, and other men took up the rhythm, and the Danes, so close, were inviting us to come and be killed, and I shouted that we were coming.

  'God help us,' Steapa said.

  'God help us,' Pyrlig echoed.

  I did not want to go. I was frightened, but I feared being called a coward more than I feared the ramparts, and so I screamed at my men to slaughter the bastards, and then I ran. I jumped over the corpse's in the ditch, lost my footing on the far side, fell on my shield and rolled aside so that no Dane could plunge a spear into my unprotected back. I hauled myself up and my helmet had skewed in the fall so that the face-plate half blinded me, and I fumbled it straight with my sword hand as I began to climb and Steapa was there, and Pyrlig was with me, and I waited for the first hard Danish blow.

  It did not come. I struggled up the bank, the shield over my head, and I expected the death blow, but there was silence and I lifted the shield and thought I must have died for all I saw was the rain-filled sky. The Danes had gone. One moment they had been sneering at us, calling us women and cowards, and boasting how they would slice open our bellies and feed our guts to the ravens, and now they were gone. I clambered to the top of the wall and saw a second ditch and second wall beyond, and the Danes were scrambling up that inner rampart and I supposed that they intended to make a defence there, but instead they vanished over its top and Pyrlig grabbed my arm and pulled me on. 'They're running!' he shouted, 'by God, the bastards are running!' He had to shout to make himself heard over the rain.

  'On! On!' someone shouted, and we ran into the second flooded ditch and up over the undefended inner bank and I saw Osric's men, the fyrd of Wiltunscir that had been defeated in the opening moments of the fight, had managed to cross the fort's walls. We learned later that they had gone into the valley where the white horse lay dead, and in the blinding rain they had made it to the fort's eastern corner which, because Guthrum thought it unapproachable, was only lightly defended. The rampart was lower there, hardly more than a grassy ridge on the valley's slope, and they had flooded over the wall and so got behind the other defenders.

  Who now ran. If they had stayed then they would have been slaughtered to a man, so they fled across the fort's wide interior, and some were slow to realise that the battle was lost and those we trapped. I just wanted to kill for Iseult's sake, and I put two fugitives down, hacking them with Serpent-Breath with such fury that she cut through mail, leather and flesh to bite as deep as an axe. I was screaming my anger, wanting more victims, but we were too many and the trapped Danes were too few.

  The rain kept falling and the thunder bellowed as I looked about for enemies to kill, and then I saw one last group of them, back to back, fighting off a swarm of Saxons, and I ran towards them and suddenly saw their banner. The eagle's wing. It was Ragnar.

  His men, outnumbered and overwhelmed, were dying.

  'Let him live!' I shouted, 'let him live!' and three Saxons turned towards me and they saw my long hair and my arm rings bright on my mailed sleeves, and they must have thought I was a Dane for they ran at me, and I fended off the first with Serpent-Breath. The second hammered my shield with his axe, and the third circled behind me and I turned fast, scything Serpent-Breath, shouted that I was a Saxon, but they did not hear me. Then Steapa slammed into them and they scattered, and Pyrlig grabbed my arm, but I shook him off and ran towards Ragnar, who was snarling at the ring of enemies, inviting any one of them to try to kill him. His banner had fallen and his crewmen were dead, but he looked like a war god in his shining mail and with his splintered shield and his long sword and his defiant face, and then the ring began to close. I ran, shouting, and he turned towards me, thinking I had come to kill him, and he raised his sword and I brushed it aside with my shield, threw my arms around him and drove him to the turf.

  Steapa and Pyrlig guarded us. They fended off the Saxons, telling them to look for other victims, and I rolled away from Ragnar, who sat up and looked at me with astonishment. I saw that his shield hand was bloody. A blade, cutting through the limewood, had sliced into his palm, hacking down between the fingers so that it looked as though he had two small hands instead of one.

  'I must bind that wound,' I said.

  'Uhtred,' he just said, as if he did not really believe it was me.

  'I looked for you,' I told him, 'because I did not want to fight you.'

  He flinched as he shook the shattered remnants of the shield away from his wounded hand. I could see Bishop Alewold running across the fort in mud-spattered robes, waving his arms and shouting that God had delivered the pagans into our hands.

  'I told Guthrum to fight outside the fort,' Ragnar said. 'We would have killed you all.'

  'You would,' I agreed. By staying in the fort, Guthrum had let us defeat his army piece by piece, but even so it was a miracle that the day was ours.

  'You're bleeding,' Ragnar said. I had taken a spear blade in the back of my right thigh. I have the scar to this day.

  Pyrlig cut a strip of cloth from a dead man's jerkin and used it to bind Ragnar's hand. He wanted to bandage my thigh, but the bleeding had lessened and I managed to stand, though the pain, which I had not felt ever since the wound had been given, suddenly struck me. I touched Thor's hammer. We had won.

  'They killed my woman,' I told Ragnar.

  He said nothing, but just stood beside me and, because my thigh was agony and I suddenly felt weak, I put an arm about his shoulders.

  'Iseult, she was called,' I said, 'and my son is dead too.' I was glad it was raining or else the tears on my face would have shown.

  'Where's Brida?'

  'I sent her down the hill,' Ragnar told me. We were limping together towards the fort's northern ramparts.

  'And you stayed?'

&n
bsp; 'Someone had to stay as a rearguard,' he said bleakly. I think he was crying too, because of the shame of the defeat. It was a battle Guthrum' could not lose, yet he had.

  Pyrlig and Steapa were still with me, and I could see Eadric stripping a dead Dane of his mail, but there was no sign of Leofric. I asked Pyrlig where he was, and Pyrlig gave me a pained look and shook his head.

  'Dead?' I asked.

  'An axe,' he said, 'in the spine.' I was numb, too numb to speak, for it did not seem possible that the indestructible Leofric was dead, but he was, and I wished I could give him a Danish funeral, a fire-funeral, so that the smoke of his corpse would rise to the halls of the gods. 'I'm sorry,' Pyrlig said.

  'The price of Wessex,' I said, and then we climbed the northern ramparts, that were crowded with Alfred's soldiers.

  The rain was lessening, though it still fell in great swathes across the plain below. It was as if we stood on the rim of the world, and ahead of us was an immensity of cloud and rain, while beneath us, on the long steep slope, hundreds of Danes scrambled to the foot of the escarpment where their horses had been left.

  'Guthrum,' Ragnar said bitterly. 'He lives!'

  'He was the first to run,' he said. 'Svein told him we should fight outside the walls,' he went on, 'but Guthrum feared defeat more than he ever wanted victory.'

  A cheer sounded as Alfred's banners were carried across the captured fort to the northern ramparts. Alfred, mounted again, and with a bronze circlet about his helmet, rode with the flags Beocca was on his knees giving thanks, while Alfred had a dazed smile and a look of disbelief, and I swear he wept as his standards were rammed into the turf at the world's edge. The dragon and the cross flew above his kingdom that had almost been lost, but had been saved so that there was still one Saxon King in England.

  But Leofric was dead and Iseult was a corpse and a hard rain fell across the land we had rescued.

  The

  e End

  Hist

  s o

  t ri

  r c

  i al lNot

  o e

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  The Westbury white horse is cut into the chalk of the escarpment beneath Bratton Camp on the edge of the Wiltshire Downs. From the north it can be seen for miles, The present horse, a handsome beast, is over a hundred feet long and almost two hundred feet high and was cut in the 1770s, making it the oldest of Wiltshire's ten white horses, but local legend says that it replaced a much older horse that was blazoned into the chalk hillside after the battle of Ethandun in 878.

  I should like to think that legend is true, but no historian can be certain of the location of the battle of Ethandun, where Alfred met Guthrum's Danes, though Bratton Camp, above the village of Edington, is the prime candidate. Bratton Camp is an Iron Age fortress which still stands just above the Westbury white horse. John Peddie, in his useful book, Alfred, Warrior King, places Ethandun at Bratton Camp, and Edgar's Stone at Kingston Deverill in the Wylye valley, and I am persuaded by his reasoning.

  There is no debate about the location of Æthelingaeg. That is now Athelney, in the Somerset Levels, near Taunton, and if Bratton Camp is substantially unaltered since 878, the levels are changed utterly.

  Today, mostly thanks to the, medieval monks who dyked and drained the land, they make a wide, fertile plain, but in the ninth century they were a vast swamp mingled with tidal flats, an almost impenetrable marsh into which Alfred retreated after the disaster at Chippenham.

  That disaster was the result of his generosity in agreeing the truce which allowed Guthrum to leave Exeter and retreat to Gloucester in Danish-held Mercia. That truce was secured by Danish hostages, but Guthrum, just as he had broken the truce arranged at Wareham in 876, again proved untrustworthy and, immediately after Twelfth Night, attacked and captured Chippenham, thus precipitating the greatest crisis of Alfred's long reign. The king was defeated and most of his country taken by the Danes. Some great nobles, Wulfhere, the Ealdorman of Wiltshire, among them, defected to the enemy, and Alfred's kingdom was reduced to the watery wastes of the Somerset Levels. Yet in the spring, just four months after the disaster at Chippenham, Alfred assembled an army, led it to Ethandun, and there defeated Guthrum. All that happened. What, sadly, did not probably happen is the burning of the cakes. That story, how a peasant woman struck Alfred after he allowed her cakes to burn, is the most famous folk tale attached to Alfred, but its source is very late and thus very unreliable.

  Alfred, Ælswith, Wulfhere, Æthelwold and Brother (later Bishop) Asser all existed, as did Guthrum.

  Svein is a fictional character. The great Danish enemies before Guthrum had been the three Lothbrok brothers, and the defeat of the last of them at the battle of Cynuit occurred while Alfred was at Athelney. For fictional reasons I moved that Saxon victory forward a year, and it forms the ending of The Last Kingdom, the novel which precedes The Pale Horseman, which meant I had to invent a character, Svein, and a skirmish, the burning of Svein's ships, to replace Cynuit.

  The two primary sources for Alfred's reign are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bishop Asser's life of the king, and neither, alas, tells us much about how Alfred defeated Guthrum at Ethandun. Both armies, by later standards, were small, and it is almost certain that Guthrum considerably outnumbered Alfred. The West Saxon fyrd that won Ethandun. was mostly drawn from Somerset, Wiltshire and western Hampshire, suggesting that all eastern Wessex, and most of the north of the country, had been subdued by the Danes. We know the fyrd of Devonshire was intact (it had won the victory at Cynuit, as was the fyrd of Dorset, yet neither are mentioned as part of Alfred's army, suggesting that they were held back to deter a seaborne attack. The lack of the fyrds from those two powerful shires, if indeed they were absent, only confirms what a remarkable victory Alfred won.

  The Saxons had been in Britain since the fifth century. By the ninth century they ruled almost all of what is now England, but then the Danes came and the Saxon kingdoms crumbled. The Last Kingdom tells of the defeat of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, and The Pale Horseman describes how Wessex almost followed those northern neighbours into history's oblivion. For a few months in early 878 the idea of England, its culture and language, were reduced to a few square miles of swamp.

  One more defeat and there would probably never have been a political entity called England. We might

  have had a Daneland instead, and this novel would probably have been written in Danish. Yet Alfred survived, he won, and that is why history awarded him the honorific 'the Great'. His successors were to finish his work, they were to take back the three northern kingdoms and so, for the first time, unite the Saxon lands into one kingdom called England, but that work was begun by Alfred the Great.

  Yet in 878, even after the victory at Ethandun, that must have seemed an impossible dream. It is a long way from Ethandun's white horse to the bleak moors north of Hadrian's Wall, so Uhtred and his companions must campaign again.

  Bernard Cornwell

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