Sword Song

by Bernard Cornwell

  I drove into them. “Uhtred!” I was shouting, “Uhtred of Bebbanburg!”

  I was inviting death. By attacking alone I let the enemy get behind me, but at that moment I was immortal. Time had slowed so that the enemy moved like snails and I was fast as the lightning on my cloak. I was shouting still as Serpent-Breath lunged into a man’s eye, driving hard till the bone of his socket stopped her thrust, and then I swept her left to slam down a sword coming at my face, and my shield lifted to take an ax blow, and Serpent-Breath dropped and I pushed her hard forward to pierce the leather jerkin of the man whose sword I had parried. I twisted her so the blade would not be seized by his belly while she gouged his blood and guts, and then I stepped left and rammed the iron boss of the shield at the axman.

  He staggered back. Serpent-Breath came from the swordsman’s belly and flew wide right to crash against another sword. I followed her, still screaming, and saw the terror on that enemy’s face, and terror on an enemy breeds cruelty. “Uhtred,” I shouted, and stared at him, and he saw death coming, and he tried to back from me, but other men came behind to block his retreat and I was smiling as I slashed Serpent-Breath across his face. Blood sprayed in the dawn, and the backswing sliced his throat and two men pushed past him and I parried one with the sword and the other with my shield.

  Those two men were no fools. They came with their shields touching and their only ambition was to push me back against the rampart and hold me there, pinned by their shields, so that I could not use Serpent-Breath. And once they had trapped me they would let other men come to jab me with blades until I lost too much blood to stand. Those two knew how to kill me, and they came to do it.

  But I was laughing. I was laughing because I knew what they planned, and they seemed so slow and I rammed my own shield forward to crash against theirs and they thought they had trapped me because I could not hope to push two men away. They crouched behind their shields and heaved forward and I just stepped back, snatching my own shield backward so that they stumbled forward as my resistance vanished. Their shields were slightly lowered as they stumbled and Serpent-Breath flickered like a viper’s tongue so that her bloodied tip smashed into the forehead of the man on my left. I felt his thick bone break, saw his eyes glaze, heard the crash of his dropped shield, and I swept her to the right and the second man parried. He rammed his shield at me, hoping to unbalance me, but just then there was a mighty shout from my left. “Christ Jesus and Alfred!” It was Father Pyrlig, and behind him the wide bastion was now swarming with my men. “You damned heathen fool,” Pyrlig shouted at me.

  I laughed. Pyrlig’s sword cut into my opponent’s arm, and Serpent-Breath beat down his shield. I remember he looked at me then. He had a fine helmet with raven wings fixed to its sides. His beard was golden, his eyes blue, and in those eyes was the knowledge of his imminent death as he tried to lift his sword with a wounded arm.

  “Hold tight to your sword,” I told him. He nodded.

  Pyrlig killed him, though I did not see it. I was moving past the man to attack the remaining enemy and beside me Clapa was swinging a huge ax so violently that he was as much a danger to our side as to the enemy, but no enemy wanted to face the two of us. They were fleeing along the ramparts and the gate was ours.

  I leaned on the low outer wall and immediately stood upright because the stones shifted under my weight. The masonry was crumbling. I slapped the loose stonework and laughed aloud for joy. Sihtric grinned at me. He had a bloodied sword. “Any amulets, lord?” he asked.

  “That one,” I pointed to the man whose helmet was decorated with raven wings, “he died well, I’ll take his.”

  Sihtric stooped to find the man’s hammer-image. Beyond him Osferth was staring at the half-dozen dead men who lay in splats of blood across the stones. He was carrying a spear that had a reddened tip. “You killed someone?” I asked him.

  He looked at me wide-eyed, then nodded. “Yes, lord.”

  “Good,” I said and jerked my head toward the sprawling corpses. “Which one?”

  “It wasn’t here, lord,” he said. He seemed puzzled for a moment, then looked back at the steps we had climbed. “It was over there, lord.”

  “On the steps?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I stared at him long enough to make him uncomfortable. “Tell me,” I said at last, “did he threaten you?”

  “He was an enemy, lord.”

  “What did he do,” I asked, “wave his one crutch at you?”

  “He,” Osferth began, then appeared to run out of words. He stared down at a man I had killed, then frowned. “Lord?”

  “Yes?”

  “You told us it was death to leave the shield wall.”

  I stooped to clean Serpent-Breath’s blade on a dead man’s cloak. “So?”

  “You left the shield wall, lord,” Osferth said, almost reprovingly.

  I straightened and touched my arm rings. “You live,” I told him harshly, “by obeying the rules. You make a reputation, boy, by breaking them. But you do not make a reputation by killing cripples.” I spat those last words, then turned to see that Sigefrid’s men had crossed the River Fleot, but had now become aware of the commotion behind them and had stopped to stare back at the gate.

  Pyrlig appeared beside me. “Let’s get rid of this rag,” he said, and I saw there was a banner hanging from the wall. Pyrlig hauled it up and showed me Sigefrid’s raven badge. “We’ll let them know,” Pyrlig said, “that the city has a new master.” He hauled up his mail coat and pulled out a banner that had been folded and tucked into his waistband. He shook it loose to reveal a black cross on a dull white field. “Praise God,” Pyrlig said, then dropped the banner over the wall, securing it by weighting its top edge with dead men’s weapons. Now Sigefrid would know that Ludd’s Gate was lost. The Christian banner was flaunted in his face.

  Yet, for the next few moments, things were quiet. I suppose Sigefrid’s men were astonished by what had happened and were recovering from that surprise. They were no longer moving toward the new Saxon town, but were still staring back at the cross-hung gate, while inside the city groups of men gathered in the streets and gazed up at us.

  I was staring toward the new town. I could see no sign of Æthelred’s men. There was a wooden palisade cresting the low slope where the Saxon town was built and it was possible Æthelred’s troops were behind the fence that had decayed in places and was entirely missing in others.

  “If Æthelred doesn’t come,” Pyrlig said softly.

  “Then we’re dead,” I finished the remark for him. To my left the river slid gray as misery toward the broken bridge and distant sea. Gulls were white on the gray. Far off, on the southern bank, I could see a few hovels where smoke rose. That was Wessex. In front of me, where Sigefrid’s men remained motionless, was Mercia, while behind me, north of the river, was East Anglia.

  “Do we shut the gate?” Pyrlig asked.

  “No,” I said. “I told Steapa to leave it open.”

  “You did?”

  “We want Sigefrid to attack us,” I said, and I thought that if Æthelred had abandoned his attack then I would die in the gate where the three kingdoms met. I still could not see Æthelred’s force, yet I was relying on my cousin’s men to give us victory. If I could tempt Sigefrid’s warriors back to the gate, and hold them there, then Æthelred could assail them from behind. That was why I had to leave the gate open, as an invitation to Sigefrid. If I had shut it then he could have used another entrance to the Roman city, and his men would not be exposed to my cousin’s assault.

  The more immediate problem was that the Danes who had stayed in the city were at last recovering from their surprise. Some were in the streets while others gathered on the walls either side of Ludd’s Gate. The walls were lower than the gate’s bastion, which meant any attack on us had to be made up the narrow stone steps which climbed from wall to bastion. Each of those steps would need five men to hold them, as would the twin stairways climbing from the street. I th
ought about abandoning the bastion’s top, but if the fight went badly in the archway, then the high rampart was our best refuge. “You’ll have twenty men,” I told Pyrlig, “to hold this bastion. And you can have him as well,” I nodded toward Osferth. I did not want Alfred’s cripple-killing son in the arch below where the fighting would be fiercest. It was down there that we would make two shield walls, one facing into the city and the other looking out toward the Fleot, and there the shield walls would clash, and there, I thought, we would die because I still could not see Æthelred’s army.

  I was tempted to run away. It would have been simple enough to have retreated the way we had come, thrusting aside the enemy in the streets. We could have taken Sigefrid’s boat, the Wave-Tamer, and used her to cross to the West Saxon bank. But I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg, stuffed full of warrior pride, and I had sworn to take Lundene. We stayed.

  Fifty of us went down the stairways and filled the gate. Twenty men faced into the city while the rest faced out toward Sigefrid. Inside the gate arch there was just room for eight men to stand abreast with their shields touching and so we made our twin shield walls under the shadows of the stone. Steapa commanded the twenty, while I stood in the front rank of the wall looking west.

  I left the shield wall and walked a few paces toward the Fleot valley. The small river, fouled by the tanners’ pits upstream, ran dirty and sluggish toward the Temes. Beyond the river Sigefrid, Haesten, and Erik had at last turned their force around and what had been their rearmost ranks of northern warriors were now wading back across the shallow Fleot to thrust my little force aside.

  I stood on their skyline. The cloud-veiled sun was behind me, but its pale light would be reflecting from the silver of my helmet and from the smoky sheen of Serpent-Breath’s blade. I had drawn her again, and now I stood with sword held out to my right and shield to my left. I stood above them, a lord in glory, a man in mail, a warrior inviting warriors to fight, and I saw no friendly troops on the farther hill.

  And if Æthelred had gone, I thought, then we would die.

  I gripped Serpent-Breath’s hilt. I stared at Sigefrid’s men, then clashed Serpent-Breath’s blade against my shield. I beat her three times and the sound echoed from the walls behind me, and then I turned and went back to my small shield wall.

  And, with a roar of anger and the howling of men who see victory, Sigefrid’s army came to kill us.

  A poet should have written the tale of that fight.

  That is what poets are for.

  My present wife, who is a fool, pays poets to sing of Christ Jesus, who is her god, but her poets falter into embarrassed silence when I limp into the hall. They know scores of songs about their saints, and they sing melancholy chants about the day their god was nailed to the cross, but when I am present they sing the real poems, those poems that the clever priest told me had been written about other men whose names had been taken out so mine could be inserted.

  They are poems about slaughter, poems about warriors, real poems.

  Warriors defend the home, they defend children, they defend women, they defend the harvest, and they kill the enemies who come to steal those things. Without warriors the land would be a waste place, desolate and full of laments. Yet a warrior’s real reward is not the silver and gold he can wear on his arms, but his reputation, and that is why there are poets. Poets tell the tales of the men who defend the land and kill a land’s enemies. That is what poets are for, yet there is no poem about the fight in Ludd’s Gate of Lundene.

  There is a poem sung in what used to be Mercia that tells of Lord Æthelred’s capture of Lundene, and it is a fine poem, yet it does not mention my name, nor Steapa’s name, nor Pyrlig’s name, nor the names of the men who really fought that day. You would think, listening to that poem, that Æthelred came and those whom the poet calls “the heathen” just ran.

  But it was not like that.

  It was not like that at all.

  I say that the Northmen came in a rush, and they did, but Sigefrid was no fool when it came to a fight. He could see how few of us blocked that gateway and he knew that if he could break my shield wall quickly then we would all die under that old Roman arch.

  I had gone back to my troops. My shield overlapped the shields of the men to my left and right, and it was just as I set myself, ready for their charge, that I saw what Sigefrid planned.

  His men had not just been staring at Ludd’s Gate, but had been reorganized so that eight warriors had been placed in the van of his attack. Four of them carried massive long spears that needed two hands to hold level. Those four had no shields, but next to each spearman was a massive warrior armed with shield and ax, and behind them were more men with shields, spears, and long-swords. I knew just what was about to happen. The four men would come at a run and hammer their spears into four of our shields. The weight of the spears and the power of the charge would drive four of us into the rank behind, and then the axmen would strike. They would not try to batter our shields into splinters, but would instead widen the gaps the four spearmen had made, hook and pull down the shields of our second rank, and so expose us to the long weapons of the men following the ax-warriors. Sigefrid had only one ambition, and that was to break our wall fast, and I had no doubt that the eight men were not only trained to break a shield wall quickly, but had done it before.

  “Brace yourselves!” I shouted, though it was a pointless shout. My men knew what they had to do. They had to stand and die. That was what they had sworn in their oaths to me.

  And I knew we would die unless Æthelred came. The power of Sigefrid’s attack would hammer into our shield wall and I had no spears long enough to counter the four that were coming. We could only try to stand fast, but we were outnumbered and the enemy’s confidence was plain. They were shouting insults, promising us death, and death was coming.

  “Close the gate, lord?” Cerdic, standing beside me, suggested nervously.

  “Too late,” I said.

  And the attack came.

  The four spearmen screamed as they ran at us. Their weapons were as big as oar shafts and had spearheads the size of short-swords. They held the spears low and I knew they aimed to strike the lower part of our shields to tip the upper rims forward so the axmen could hook more easily and thus strip our defense in an instant.

  And I knew it would work because the men attacking us were Sigefrid’s breakers of shield walls. This was what they had trained to do, and had done, and the corpse-hall must have been full of their victims. They screamed their incoherent challenge as they ran at us. I could see their distorted faces. Eight men, big men, big-bearded and mail-coated, warriors to fear, and I braced my shield and crouched slightly, hoping a spear would strike the heavy metal boss in the shield’s center. “Push against us,” I called to my second rank.

  I could see one of the spears was aimed at my shield. If it struck low enough then my shield would be tilted forward and the axman would strike down with his big blade. Death in a spring morning, and so I put my left leg against the shield, hoping that would stop the shield being driven inward, but I suspected the spear would shatter the limewood anyway and the blade would gouge into my groin. “Brace yourselves!” I shouted again.

  And the spears came for us. I saw the spearman grimacing as he readied to hurl his weight against my shield. And that crash of metal on wood was just a heartbeat away when Pyrlig struck instead.

  I did not know what happened at first. I was waiting for the spear’s blow and readying to parry an ax blow with Serpent-Breath, when something fell from the sky to slam into the attackers. The long spears dropped and their blades gouged the roadway just paces in front of me, and the eight men staggered, all cohesion and impetus gone. At first I thought two of Pyrlig’s men had jumped from the gate’s high rampart, but then I saw that the Welshman had hurled two corpses from the bastion’s top. The bodies, both of big men, were still dressed in mail and their weight slammed onto the spear shafts, driving the weapons down and causing chaos in the e
nemy’s front rank. One moment they had been in line, threatening, and now they were stumbling on corpses.

  I moved without thinking. Serpent-Breath hissed in a backswing and her blade crashed into an axman’s helmet and I sawed her back, seeing blood show through the broken metal. That axman went down as I slammed my shield’s heavy boss into a spearman’s face and felt his bones collapse.

  “Shield wall!” I shouted, stepping back.

  Finan had gone forward like me and had killed another spearman. The road was obstructed now by three corpses and at least one stunned man, and as I backed toward the gate’s arch, two more bodies were hurled from the bastion. The corpses thumped heavily on the roadway, bounced, then lay as extra stumbling blocks to Sigefrid’s advance, and it was then that I saw Sigefrid.

  He was in the second rank, a baleful figure in his thick bear cloak. That fur alone could stop most sword blows, and beneath it he wore shining mail. He was roaring at his men to advance, but the sudden corpse fall had checked them. “Forward!” Sigefrid bellowed, and pushed his way into the front rank and came straight for me. He was staring at me and shouting, but what he shouted I do not remember.

  Sigefrid’s attack had lost all its impetus. Instead of hitting us at a run, they closed on us at a walk and I remember thrusting my shield forward, and the crash as our two shields banged together, and the shock of Sigefrid’s weight, though he must have felt the same because neither of us was thrown off balance. He rammed a sword at me and I felt a thudding blow on my shield, and I did the same to him. I had sheathed Serpent-Breath. She was and is a lovely blade, but a long-sword is no use when the shield walls come close as lovers. I had drawn Wasp-Sting, my short-sword, and I felt with her blade for a gap between the enemy’s shields and drove her forward. She struck nothing.