Hardrada and Tostig sailed up the Humber and then the Ouse towards York. This was Tostig’s first objective. York is a big town. A big manufacturing town, a big trading town, a port, for though it is thirty miles or more from the open sea the land between is a flat marshy plain and the Ouse and other rivers are navigable far inland. It’s almost as big as London -- some say bigger. Although Tostig had been genuinely unpopular north of the Tees he had got on well with the burghers of York and he told Hardrada that with reasonable guarantees given on both sides it would surrender without a fight.
They sailed up the Ouse, through Selby, which paid handsome tribute to avoid being pillaged, as far as Riccall, where they learned that Edwin and Morcar were concentrating at Tadcaster, some eight miles to the east. The invaders left their ships at Riccall and prepared to march on York with the River Ouse protecting their west flank, their left, and in response Edwin and Morcar moved to York too, about ten miles. Timor caught up with them half-way between Tadcaster and York, on the evening of the eighteenth.
They were strung out over three miles on the Roman road that links Leeds and York, much of it raised above the levels of the waterlands around. It was a grey day, but not cold, cloud filling the sky to the south and west beneath the high white cirrus above. For sure the weather was breaking at last after one of the longest dry spells anyone could remember.
With the sun dipping towards the Pennines Timor tried leaving the road but soon found his horses, he had five men with him, couldn’t cope with ground that was marshy even after that dry late summer, so they had to stay on the Roman road and use the bridges and causeways. But it was virtually blocked. The fyrd at the rear of the column simply filled the space and moved forward at a steady stroll - you couldn’t call it a march. Further up the mounted housecarls rode four abreast and none would move to the side until they had been cajoled, sworn at and occasionally pushed. The result was he couldn’t get to Edwin and Morcar personally before they reached York by when they were having supper in the great hall there.
He showed his documents to a lacquey who took them to Edwin. Edwin scanned them, turned to Morcar who shook his head: tell me, he seemed to say. He went back to the bone he was chewing. A lacquey brought Timor a lump of bread and cheese and a flagon of dark watery ale, the ‘brrun’ of the region. Eventually, when the earls had eaten and drunk as much as they could, they sent for him. Nevertheless, he was made to stand in the body of the hall and look up at them, across the table.
‘You’re from Harold?’
‘Yes.’
‘One of his war council?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s he got to say, then?’
Timor took a deep breath.
‘He asks you not to fight Hardrada until he gets here,’ he said.
The faces on both brothers darkened. They muttered to each other. The lesser earls and thegns around them fell silent. At last Morcar looked up.
‘You mean -- he thinks we’ve not got the beating of Hardrada and that bugger Tostig without hint?’
‘No. But he does think that on your own Hardrada will give you a good day’s fighting before you beat him and that you’ll lose many men, men we will need when it comes to beating William.’
‘Is he saying he can’t beat William without us?’
Edward the Confessor would have swallowed his pride and said yes. Harold had told Timor to return the same answer as he had already given Morcar but the other way round.
‘He believes he can, but only at great cost. He asks you to consider how much better it will be if both invaders are forced off our land with as little loss of life as possible.
Edwin laughed, almost mockingly.
‘There’s no glory to be won outfacing an enemy by sheer weight of numbers.’
They turned away from Timor, ignored him. Edwin called for a pair of dice, Morcar for a refill of his drinking horn. Timor waited. Edwin rolled the dice and the thegn on his left picked them up and rolled them too. There was a lot of laughter at the result. Morcar signalled to a harpist waiting nearby that he should play. Timor took a step forward.
‘My lords,’ he called, ‘it is the king’s wish you should not fight Hardrada until the king is here.’
Silence fell, spread down the hall. Again Edwin’s face flushed, then he leant back and spread his elbows. Head on one side he spoke quietly.
‘Come closer, little man, and listen carefully to what the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria have to say. First. The weather has changed. Your master will have felt the change too. Even if he is on his way north, will he not now march back again knowing the Duke could perhaps be putting to sea at this very moment-?’
‘No, my Lord. He asks me to swear to you on his behalf that he will come north first --’
‘An oath sworn when the wind blew from the north. Second. Hardrada has come with Tostig, your master’s brother. Will Harold treat his brother like the traitor he is? Or will he seek to patch the quarrel between them? Do not try to answer that question for no one knows the secret heart of a man where his kin are concerned. And last. If we do not go out and fight Hardrada we must either leave this city, our city, to be plundered by him, or seek to defend it if he attacks. The walls are nothing, the defences have not been kept up - not at all during all the time Tostig was Earl here. The streets are narrow, the houses wood. If we stay within the walls all Hardrada has to do is fire it and attack us in the confusion. No. We must fight him, and we must fight him in the open. And that is what we intend to do. Tomorrow. In the fields that lie between here and Fulford Bridge. You may, if you please, be our guest and watch, watch while real soldiers deal with this old man and the jerkin-lifter traitor at his side.’
Timor thought that that was all, and turned to go. Small though he was and slight with it, he was as loth to plead, cajole or even argue as any mighty lord or warrior. But Morcar had leapt from his seat, came round the table and followed him into the hall, catching him by the shoulder and turning him. He spoke into his ear, almost a hiss, so no one else could hear.
‘After you have told your master how we beat the Norwegian, add one thing more. Ask him, ask it from Edwin and Morcar, ask him why our sister, to whom he was wed these six months since, remains a virgin. We should like to know, for as things stand it can mean only one of two things. Either he has no balls, but his bastards in Ireland would seem to suggest this is not the right answer, or he means to set her aside once we have fought his battles for him. Tell him, I, Morcar of Northumbria, want a true answer and will challenge him to give it me when we meet, King or no.’
Timor smelled the mead coming deep from the young man’s stomach and decided that carrying things further would lead to a fight at best, and a beating at worst. He left the hall. Not at all a question of Timor mortis conturbat me, simply, discretion can be the better part of valour.
Chapter Forty-Six
Six days later Harold walked over ground still littered with thousands of corpses. There were not many carrion birds, nor looters of bodies either - by then an even larger killing field lay some eight miles to the east, at Stamford Bridge, and such animals, birds, and men who profit from battle-fields had moved on. Timor told him how the earlier battle had gone.
‘I was standing about here, just behind Edwin’s standard. As you can see the city’s walls are a mile or so behind us and we felt we could fall back on them if we had to. Although the ground is almost flat what slopes there are were in our favour, especially over there to the east, on the left of our position.’
The ground was uncultivated. There were banks of rushes near the river, reeds and coarse grass and low bog-myrtle and then as the land rose a little heather as well -- none of it making any serious impediment to movement. It was clearly common land on which cattle and sheep were grazed, and in places where the river bank was low the ground was churned up where animals had come down to drink.
‘Over to the west,’ Timor went on, ‘you can see the ground is flatter and marshy but the right wing
had its shoulder on the bank of the Ouse . . .’
‘Right up to the river?’ Harold asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And how many housecarls did they have, Edwin and Morcar?’
‘About four thousand.’
Harold shaded his eyes.
‘And the left was on that rise?’
‘Yes.’
‘That makes a hell of a long line for four thousand men to hold.’
‘Yes. But the fyrd made up another five thousand or so. They put most of the fyrd down on the right, protected, they thought, by the river, and the best housecarls on the left. The idea was that these housecarls, Northumbrians led by Morcar, should attack Hardrada’s right, using the slope for added advantage, while the rest of the housecarls held the centre, and the fyrd the right.’
‘But there’s a second river running right through the middle of the position.’
It meandered through the coarse grass and rushes and did not look much. Where it ran into the Ouse it spread into a wide triangle of mud -- one of the places where the cattle came to drink since for a space both it and the eastern shore of the Ouse had no real banks and the water was shallow. At first sight, it was little more than a ditch.
‘It’s rained a bit since then, so there wasn’t as much water in it as there is now . . .’
‘But it was just as wide, the sides just as deep and steep. And the ground between it and the Ouse must have been almost as boggy as it is now. And I’d guess a thousand or more died in it. Tell me. You were in position before the main body of Hardrada’s army came up?’
‘Yes.’
‘So his scouts, front-runners could see it all. And Tostig too, no doubt, who lived here for what, ten years, and knew the land like the back of his hand.’ Harold shook his head, pulled palms down his face, grimaced. ‘What puzzles me,’ he added, ‘is how any of you got away alive.’
The first thing that became clear to Timor was that the invaders were in very good order, well armed, holding their positions well as they dismounted and passed their horses to the rear. The pale yellow watery sunlight glittered on their mail and helmets, some of which were the old-fashioned Viking ones with horns or wings. A screen of lighter troops with archers walked in front of them in open order: they would be enough to hinder or slow down an early assault from the Northumbrians and Mercians, give the housecarls time to form up to answer it. The standards of both Hardrada and Tostig were together and in the centre -- Hardrada’s the huge black raven on a white ground, the Land Waster, dreaded for a century or more.
As soon as the invaders’ right came to the foot of the slope and up to the little river, which at this point really was little more than a ditch, being a good half mile from its junction with the Ouse, Morcar led the Northumbrians in an attack down the slope that favoured them. The light troops, all on the English side from the fyrd, briefly skirmished between the two lines, firing arrows, throwing spears, axes and stones tied to short handles. Then, the Northumbrian housecarls charged. The first onslaught was fierce and the invaders’ fell back fifty yards or more, but contesting every inch.
‘Did they link shields?’
‘Only when the pressure warranted it.’
Timor, looking again out over the bare, corpse-strewn slopes, remembered the repeated charges of the English, led by thegns wielding huge axes, and heavy swords, how they waded into the ranks of the Norsemen who often played a cunning game, letting the attackers beyond the first line, separating them into smaller groups and then cutting them up. Bit by bit the attack slowed down, the Northumbrians pulled back, regained breath, and then charged in again, but with every yard won the slope levelled and no longer favoured the English. By midday the invaders’ superior numbers began to tell, and the attacks became weaker. Morcar was hurt early on -- severely enough to make it difficult for him to fight, though he continued to direct the assault from higher up the slope.
‘But they did not counter-attack?’
‘Not then. Not yet.’
‘What was happening elsewhere?’
‘Not a lot. The Mercians crossed the ditch in the centre and the Norsemen fell back a little but then held their ground. They were very evenly matched, so much so that for some of the time it seemed they were just content to throw things at each other and shout abuse, then the Mercians would come forward in a surge, the Norsemen fell back another twenty yards, locked shields and held them --’
‘Oh, he was a cunning bastard old Hardrada . . .’
Timor, who had been there, knew what Harold meant, but was impressed that now, walking over the field, Harold was able to see so clearly what had happened. The fyrd on the extreme English right, filling the angle made by the junction of the ditch and the river, began to break ranks and move towards the ditch, some, without orders, even crossed it, urging on the Mercian centre, clearly wanting to join them. At that moment, it was now well past midday, Timor recalled how the horsemen about the Land Waster suddenly moved to their left, and Hardrada himself, dismounting and seizing a huge double-handed axe, led fresh men who had not yet been engaged at all, across the muddy shallow patch where the cattle came for water (‘It was firmer ground then that it is now,’ Timor said.) They waded into the fyrd, whose ranks had been depleted by their movement to the centre. At the same time the Norse centre suddenly surged forward. Both the fyrd and the Mercian housecarls were now forced back into the ditch where it was narrowest and the banks four, five feet high and steep, the fyrd on the west bank the housecarls on the east, and both in complete confusion.
‘He cut them up,’ Timor concluded, ‘The slaughter was terrible. It went on almost to dusk for the English were by then trapped on all sides, by men, the ditch and the river, and of course outnumbered anyway. They fought well. As well as they could.’
By now they had themselves reached the north-west bank of the ditch. It was still filled by numberless naked corpses - when the battle was over, and the leaders were negotiating terms for the surrender of York without putting it to fire and sword, the Norsemen had forced the prisoners they had taken to strip off the chain mail, and gather up the shields, helmets and swords of the fallen. A great pile of weaponry still remained above the cattle-crossing, guarded now by Harold’s men. But already in England there were more arms and armour than there were men who knew how to use them.
Harold, and the group about him, came to a standstill. Harold sighed and turned away.
‘Last week,’ he said, ‘we got news from Normandy. William got a south westerly breeze. This must have been getting on for a fortnight ago. He could have crossed but he’s a careful, wily bugger and he used it for a dummy run. Moved his fleet from Dives, near Caen, across the Seine Estuary and all the way up to St Valery on the Somme. Remember St Valery and Guy de Ponthieu? He lost a couple of ships and some horses, but the whole trip was longer than the one he now faces.’
Nearby, two crows squabbled with flapping black wings over the eye of a corpse. Behind, Harold Rip from Thornig Hill pulled his jerkin up and his leggings down and pissed, carefully aiming the stream into the mouth of another. His own cheek had been slashed to the bone and, as both hands were occupied, flies settled in the gash. He shook his head to shift them.
‘For all we know,’ Harold went on, ‘he could have done it by now. He could be in London, for all we know . . .’
‘I have to confess,’ Junipera intervened, ‘you’ve got me a bit lost. What you have just told us is your friend Timor’s account of the battle outside York . . .?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But you’re telling it as you heard it from his lips almost a week later . . .?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that was after the second battle, the one where Harold beat the Norsemen.’
‘The day after, yes.’
Adeliza chipped in, pert as usual.
‘Twentieth of September, battle of Fulford. Twenty-fifth of September, battle of Stamford Bridge, twenty-sixth of September Timor tells you about the battl
e of Fulford. Got it?’
‘Got it. So now you’re going to tell us about Stamford Bridge. Which you actually took part in yourself.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Quint interrupted. ‘Two pitched battles on top of each other and with a third still to come is a bit much. I’d like to hear first what our friend Taillefer can tell us about what was happening in Normandy, this move from Dives to the Somme, and so on.’
‘Picture this.’ Taillefer took his harp out of Alain’s hands, adjusted a couple of the tuning pegs, settled the base on the edge of his chair between his legs and stroked a couple of arpeggios out of it. The rich inlays of gold and mother-of-pearl in its sound box glimmered in the lamp-light. ‘The sea pearly, glaucous . . .’
‘What does that word mean?’ Quint asked with some petulance. Being ignorant about something was one thing he hated more than admitting ignorance -- but only just.
‘Having a yeasty bloom as on a grape or plum.’ Taillefer steadied the harp with his left hand and reached a glaucous plum out of the bowl in front of him. ‘Just the day for a sail,’ he went on, having first removed the stone from his mouth. His fingers plucked out a rhythmic little ditty, the sort of tune sailors sing as they haul up canvas. ‘The breeze light, hardly enough to shift the violet and mauve haze that hung along the horizon beneath a distant chain of pearls that might have marked the coast of the isle of Wight-’
The Last English King Page 34
