Conqueror tt-2

by Stephen Baxter

  Cynewulf gasped. 'You can't be serious. You love that horse.'

  'Better than most of my family. But he has already done his job, in carrying me here; I will have no need of him tomorrow. Or,' he said thoughtfully, 'I could discharge my obligation to Woden by giving him a man.' And he flashed his sword at Ibn Zuhr, pressing the tip of its blade under the Moor's chin. 'We kept a Dane alive for the purpose, but a Moor will do just as well. That way I get to keep my horse, and rid myself of a mouth that flaps before kings. What do you think, cousin?'

  Cynewulf dared say nothing. With astonishing calm Ibn Zuhr continued to stroke the restless horse. Arngrim turned away with a laugh, lowered the sword, and the moment was broken.

  Arngrim took the horse's reins from Ibn Zuhr, ignoring the Moor. He patted Strong-and-Fleet on the muzzle, and the fine old horse ducked his head. 'Come on, Fleet. You've one last service to perform for me…' He led the horse towards the pit. Cynewulf saw a Dane being dragged forward by two burly English, cowed and beaten.

  Through all this Ibn Zuhr had said not a word. But, Cynewulf saw, his eyes burned.

  XV

  In the cold light of dawn, under a sky empty of cloud, the army of Wessex marched to the head of the ridge over Ethandune. The Danes, as confident as Arngrim had said, did not bother trying to stop the English taking the higher ground.

  Once they were on the ridge the English sorted themselves out, with the King and his hearth-companions to the rear under the fluttering dragon banner of Wessex, then the reserve troops – and then the front line, who would make the shield wall when the battle came.

  Arngrim pushed through to the front of the English line, in the very centre, as Alfred had ordered. He looked down on the Danes from his height on the ridge. The lines of the Force were orderly, wooden shields shining and mail gleaming in the misty light. They watched the English with an ominous stillness.

  Like the men around him Arngrim had his sword in its scabbard on his back, and his axe and his stabbing sword to hand. He wore his shirt of chain-mail, on his arm was his shield, wooden with an iron frame, and on his head was his pointed iron helmet. A strip of iron came down before his face to protect his nose, so that he saw the world framed by straight edges. He was already hot, encased in heavy iron. But he was ready.

  The men around him formed into rough ranks. There was some jostling as the men tried to find a place in the front rank – or to squeeze back out of it, depending on their courage – and there was a clatter of shield on shield as they practised forming the wall. These fellows close to the front were thegns or the sons of thegns, and some of the healthier and braver of the fyrd; they were Alfred's best soldiers, with the best equipment. Looking around, Arngrim was dismayed to see how much younger than him most of them were. At his right hand side, for instance, was Ordgar, Aethelnoth's man, who had stopped him on his return from Eoforwic. He must have been a good ten years Arngrim's junior.

  Perhaps that was why he felt a curious detachment about today. He felt none of the pulsing energy he used to know in battle, the longing to pound an enemy's flesh – the secret thrill that surely fuelled man's lust for war, the knowledge that it was fun. Perhaps Arngrim was too old for such fun. But even so he must do his duty, and he hefted his stabbing sword, getting used to its weight.

  Ordgar was nervous, though he was trying to hide it. 'We outnumber them,' he said. 'The Danes. And we have the advantage of the higher ground. But they are all warriors. We are farmers. They have the cream of armour and weaponry robbed from all the English kingdoms. We have pitchforks.'

  'We have advantages; they have advantages.'

  'The best of us are here. But it is a thin crust, and if they break through…'

  'We must be sure they do not.'

  'Yes.' Ordgar looked down the hill. 'I have fought before. I have killed Danes. But I have never served in a shield wall.'

  Arngrim growled, 'It is the ultimate test.'

  'Will I fail?'

  Arngrim knew there was little he could say. Even Alfred could not be certain of surviving the day; kings had fallen before. Alfred had given orders that if he fell today his wife and family were to be taken to the kingdom of the Franks, where an infant king would be raised in exile. 'Ordgar, you are thinking too much. But don't worry. In the thick of it there is no time to think-'

  Something flashed in the corner of Arngrim's vision, like a bird flying.

  A man cried, 'Lift your shields!'

  A spear thudded harmlessly into the ground before the front rank. But a second flew further, and pierced the body of an English warrior. His blood was bright as a flower in the spring sunlight.

  More spears flew.

  Arngrim raised his shield above his head. 'To me! To me!' Ordgar and others near him came together and held up their shields. Arngrim could hear the screams of more men falling, and heard a steady hail on the shields, as arrows and spears buried themselves in the wood.

  And now he heard the whip of bow-strings, the hiss of arrows as the English bowmen replied.

  'They are coming!' somebody cried. 'The Danes!'

  Arngrim held up his shield, risking a glimpse down the hill. The Danes were marching steadily up the slope, their shields locked: it was their wall, their skjaldborg, the shield-fort. They moved without a sound, without a cry or a drumbeat, save for the thud of their footsteps on the ground. Some fell to the English arrows, but the rest came on without flinching.

  Arngrim cried, 'Make the wall!' The call was echoed by others, up and down the English line. 'Shield wall! Make the wall!'

  The front line held their shields before their bodies and overlapped them, locking them together, each man braced against the next. This exposed them to the deadly hail from the sky, but they had rehearsed for this, and the line behind pushed forward, sharing the cover of their shields with the front rank. To be in the middle of it was close, hot, intimate, with each man pressed up against the next. Arngrim felt the heavy mass of the bodies of the men behind, the anxious breath of a nervous warrior on his neck, and the stench of sweat and piss.

  As they closed the Danes suddenly ran at the English. They clattered their swords against their shields, and roared, the noise overpowering. In their helmets and mail they might have been mirror-images of the English. And as they covered the last few paces Arngrim could see individual faces, pale and strong, broken into grins as they hurled abuse. Arngrim clasped his sword and roared defiance.

  The walls clashed with a slam of wood and iron.

  The Danes, running, had the momentum, and Arngrim staggered back. He was surrounded by a mass of hot, struggling bodies, the English at his back, the Danes before him, their faces not an arm's length away from his own. There was no space to stand back, no room to take Ironsides from its scabbard on his back. He had to make his own space by shoving forward with the shield strapped to his left arm, so he could stab with the short sword in his right.

  His first thrust was into the open mouth of a Dane. His war scream turned to bloody gurgles as Arngrim dragged his sword out of his wrecked throat. Another took his place, but Arngrim was able to sweep him aside with a slap of his blade. But another took his place and Arngrim hammered at his smooth young face as if his sword were a club.

  All the time he was wary of axes being swung under the wall, efforts to hamstring him. And already there was blood everywhere, all over his hands and arms and mail shirt, and the ground was slippery with it, and bits of flesh clung to his sword.

  Still the young Danes came, one after another to be cut down.

  This was the reality of the shield wall, the nightmare of it. No matter how many you killed there was always another, as if your enemy was not human at all but a monster with many heads. But as the grim work continued, as his lungs strained and fatigue built up in his muscles, a kind of calm descended on him. He passed beyond the need for air, and found strength from reserves his body hadn't known it possessed. It was the reverie of battle, of slaughter.

  He heard laughter besid
e him. It was Ordgar, who wielded his sword with a will, lost in his own universe of killing, lost to the battle-fever.

  But then a mighty axe-blade fell over the shield wall and slammed through the young man's helmet, and cleft his skull. Ordgar fell instantly – but his place was taken just as quickly by another Englishman. So Ordgar was gone, Arngrim thought, his young dreams terminated in a flash of iron, and the shield wall had already closed around his fallen body as the sea enfolds a raindrop.

  Arngrim looked over to see who on the Danish side had wielded that immense blow. He saw a giant of a man, who used only an axe, the crudest of weapons, that he slammed down into English flesh, over and over, dragging it back with his huge muscled arms.

  Arngrim screamed his name. 'Egil!'

  The Dane turned. But then the current of the battle separated them, and Arngrim had to deal with the next young man who threw himself at him, sword flashing, eager to die, and then with the next, and the next.

  XVI

  In the King's camp, priests prayed and women waited nervously.

  This Monday in May was peaceful. The sun was warm on Cynewulf's face. In the churned-up mud of the camp's floor green grass shoots struggled to find air and light amid the prints of feet and hooves.

  He could hear nothing of the battle. Somehow it seemed wrong that men should be slaughtering each other with so little noise; there ought to be a grander sound, a slamming like thunder, perhaps, and flashes in the sky.

  At last his curiosity overcame his caution.

  It wasn't hard to slip out of the camp. But he had gone only a dozen paces when Ibn Zuhr caught him up. 'Arngrim told me to keep an eye on you.'

  'I don't trust you, Moor.'

  'I don't trust you either. So we're even.'

  Cynewulf eyed him. 'Come, then.'

  Retracing his tracks from the day when he had gone spying with Arngrim, he made for the high ground from which they had watched the Danish camp.

  From here Cynewulf could see the battle laid out as if on a diagram. There was the King's party – he thought he recognised Alfred himself, his jewelled crown a pinprick of colour, his dragon banner fluttering. Around him his reserve troops milled, most of them fyrd, a muddy, homogenous mass. On the other side of the killing field was a mirror-image party that must be Guthrum and his own companions.

  And between these two poles of command was the battle front. All Cynewulf could make out was a compressed mass of hundreds of men, pressed together beneath glittering swords and axes. At the centre of the mob was a kind of bloody froth, a line of bright crimson, where the swords stabbed and the axes swung. Cynewulf was astonished by the brightness of the blood, the quantity of it, and the almost neat way limbs were severed and torsos sliced through.

  Pagans were much drawn to boundary places, river banks and ocean surfaces, places where one world touched another. That clash of shield walls was just such a boundary place, a boundary between death and life, where breathing men were stabbed and hewn to lifeless pulp.

  Ibn Zuhr was analytical, dismissive. 'Only a few hundred men on each side. This would have been no more than an incident in the great battles of the past. The Caesars brought armies of tens of thousands to this island. And there is no tactic but to press and thrust. A thousand years ago Alexander the Great used cavalry to-'

  Cynewulf didn't know what cavalry was, and didn't care. 'Shut up,' he snarled.

  The Moor seemed startled by the priest's anger. But he said, 'We have seen all we can see. We should go.'

  Cynewulf couldn't bear to look at the man. But he nodded, and the two of them withdrew.

  XVII

  Fighting down the slope of the ridge rather than up it was a slight advantage that became greater as the day wore on, as men fell, and those who survived became exhausted and weakened by blows and injuries. And so the English were steadily pressing the Danes back down the hill, back towards their camp, the skjaldborg intact but retreating step by step.

  But the shield wall was a mill that ground up men. As warriors fell, each side poured in more and more bodies, living men to be processed to corpses. The English did outnumber the Danes, but once the cream of the English army was used up there would be only the low-quality levies left. If the skjaldborg did not break soon, Arngrim saw, the English would lose the battle simply by bleeding to death.

  How was it to be broken? Even as he cut and stabbed and thrust, even as he felt his own strength drain with the blood he must be losing, Arngrim tried to think, just as the King had urged him to. If they couldn't batter their way through the Danes, what was to be done?

  Then Egil reared up before him once more. The Beast of Cippanhamm had lost his helmet, and some lucky English blow had smashed his teeth, turning his mouth into a bloody pit lined with jagged stumps. But his eyes were wild. He was laughing.

  And he recognised Arngrim.

  In that instant Amgrim thought of Cynewulf and his prophecy. If not for the Menologium this battle might not be taking place at all, for Alfred might not have found the determination to wage it – and if not for the Menologium the Beast would not have the faith in his own invulnerability which must have carried him through battle after battle, to this field. They were here, Amgrim thought, both of them, positioned like counters on a game board, because of the Weaver, the sage of the furthest future. And yet they could die here.

  Egil threw himself forward.

  Their shields slammed. Arngrim was thrust back half a pace. Egil stepped back to drive again, but before the Dane could close Arngrim raised his shield and slammed its boss into Egil's face. Egil staggered, his nose a bloody ruin, and Arngrim had room to draw Ironsides from its scabbard on his back. But Egil came on again, spattering Arngrim with blood and spit and snot, and their shields clashed once more. It was almost with relief that Arngrim realised that he could give himself up to this elemental fight, let himself fall into the pit of darkness inside him.

  But he must think. To break the Danish shield wall was more important than to sate himself in a private war with this animal of a man – and in a flash he saw how he could do it.

  With a roar and a vast exertion he shoved Egil back once more. And the next time Egil came at him, rather than facing Egil's charge, he flung himself backwards. He clattered into the fyrdmen behind him and finished up on his back.

  Egil, off balance and caught by surprise, ran a couple of steps forward and tumbled over. His huge strength had been holding this section of the Danes' wall together, and without his support the Danes around him slipped and fell. A length of the skjaldborg collapsed, battered Danish shields knocking against each other.

  And the English, roaring, rushed into the gap like flies into a wound.

  Arngrim's ploy had worked. Now all he needed was a grain of luck for himself, a splinter of time.

  But his luck ran out. Egil was already on his feet, and standing over him. The blade of his axe flashed.

  Arngrim had no time to raise his shield, no time to roll away. The iron cut through his mail shirt, between his belly and his groin, and buried itself deep in his gut. Pain slammed, and the world greyed.

  Egil stood over him, still laughing from that ruin of a mouth. And he dragged at his axe. Arngrim could feel the blade slice through soft organs. And then it caught on something, perhaps his pelvis. More pain burst inside him.

  But he still held Ironsides. Screaming, he swung his sword.

  The heavy, faithful blade cut through Egil's right arm just below the shoulder, in a stroke as neat as a butcher's. Egil howled. His arm hanging by threads of gristle, he lost his grip on his axe. And Amgrim grabbed Egil's hand. As Egil stumbled back Arngrim twisted the hand with the last of his strength, so that the final bits of gristle snapped, and the severed arm fell across his belly.

  The world swam away.

  XVIII

  With victory secured, Alfred's priests launched themselves into a long sequence of services of thanksgiving. Alfred endured this for an hour.

  Then he broke up the se
rvices and put the priests to work. In their vestments they were sent down to the battlefield, where they were to tend the English wounded. His clerks too were sent to the field, to work their way across broken soil soaked in blood, to retrieve the weapons of the dead, swords and spears and shields. Even arrow-heads were to be retrieved for their precious iron, Alfred ordered, plucked from the bodies of the dead if necessary.

  Alfred knew the fight was not yet done, and even in the aftermath of this great triumph he was thinking ahead. The surviving Danes were retreating to their old quarters at Cippanhamm. There they would have to be starved out by a siege – and for that the English would need all the weapons they could muster.

  Cynewulf waited in the camp until Arngrim was brought in.

  Two thegns bore the body, laid out on two shields set on spears. Arngrim's face was battered to bloody meat, his mail shirt punctured in a dozen places, and even the shields on which he was carried were splintered and broken. With him on his improvised bier was his sword Ironsides, undamaged but bloodstained – and the severed arm of the beast Egil.

  Alfred had the arm of the Beast nailed to the great oak tree at the heart of the camp, above his giving-throne, where all men could see it. Alfred announced that the English had won the day because of the advantage of the high ground, because they had taken the battle to the Danes after a winter of containment – and because of the courage and intelligence of Arngrim, who had made the crucial break in the skjaldborg.

  Cynewulf had his cousin laid out in a tent, on a heap of blankets. He immediately found the main wound. It was a rip in Arngrim's lower belly, made by a blow powerful enough to have cut through his mail. Though one of the King's own physicians fussed around, Cynewulf chased him away. He would have nobody tend his cousin save Ibn Zuhr. Though he had always despised the Moor Cynewulf had no doubt that his foreign medicine was better than anything the King's doctors could muster.