Back in Winchester he had not bothered to look for anybody to come with him. They were all blitherers. He would rather die than stand around listening to his father scream. The wind was blustery, and grey clouds rolled over the sky. The days were cold for the middle of the summer, and there was an edge to the wind. He knew there was a good chance that he would die.
There had been no rain all spring, and, as he rode, he passed fields with the crops already withered and gone, the dust blowing away, the hardscrabble showing like scabs, as if the crust wore thin over the earth. He passed through a village with doors shuttered and no one visible, although some smoke curled up from the hearths.
But as he rode in, a half-naked man burst out of a door and ran down the street away from him. There could be others. He imagined he saw eyes in the windows; he was glad to get past the village.
It was cold, and he began to feel cold at heart. He was alone, the world huge around him, and what lay ahead, he knew, would be terrible. His food ran out. There was nothing anywhere to eat. He stayed the night in a deserted hut by the road.
In the morning, hungry, he was slow to get going. This seemed the emptiest place he had ever been, the road running west over low hills, the sky grey and low and dank. He had started this, and he would not stop now. He swung into his saddle and nudged the horse into a swinging trot, to get through it faster.
Late in the day he came up on a low rise and drew rein to let his horse rest. His belly was cramped with hunger. A broad valley lay below him, with a river along the near edge. On the far side the slopes of the hills rolled up into crests of forest. The low ground between was plowed into fields, but he saw no people, no animals, nothing moving down there. Then his eye caught on a thin line of smoke rising beyond the down ahead of them.
“Aethelstan,” he said, aloud. He hoped it was Aethelstan. He wiped his face on the sleeve of his shirt and rode that way.
He left the big road behind and followed a narrow path, which wound across the valley toward the distant down. His horse was tired, head low, ears slack. Drifting down the western sky, the sun fell beneath the ledge of dark cloud, and its light came straight into his face. Then, ahead of him, Edmund heard someone call out, not in English.
He swung his horse’s head around, but, before he could get it running, a pack of men on foot burst up along the trail, coming toward him, yelling. Vikings. He spurred the horse into a gallop. Where the trail curved, he left it and headed across the flat valley, the slope of the down on his left. The dark was closing in. The Vikings were whooping after him, and a rock sailed past him. His horse kept wanting to stop, and he flogged it on, stumbling and staggering along a boggy meadow. He was closing with the hill on his left, steep and bush clogged.
Ahead part of the slope had washed out in a fan of pebbles. Where the slope had fallen down was a deep draw, and he swung his horse into it. The ravine pinched narrow on both sides, the floor rising. He lashed his horse up through the clawing brush and slippery pebble slides. He could hear men panting after him, their voices exuberant. The draw ended in a sheer face. He was trapped. He hauled the horse around and put it at the side of the hill. Snorting, it bounded up, slid, lunged up again, and heaved itself over a tumble of boulders and was suddenly staggering onto flat ground.
He rode out on the top of the down, the brush swishing against his legs, and then from either side men sprang on him.
He reached for his sword. There were too many; he would die here. He would die here fighting. Somebody seized his horse’s reins, and then he heard the voices around him speaking Saxon.
He called, “God be with all good men here. I am Edmund Aetheling – I’m looking for my brother Aethelstan.”
A cheer rose. A swarm of men on foot packed around them. Edmund reached down, touching hands, greeting them in God’s name. They led him to the west end of the down, where, ahead, he saw a tall shape he knew.
“Aethelstan!”
By the fire his brother turned, and he roared out Edmund’s name and came running. The two embraced. Aethelstan was much the taller. “Edmund! God’s love, I’m glad to see you. Did you bring—”
Edmund said, “I brought no one. I am alone.”
Aethelstan looked beyond him, and then back to him, the firelight on his face. He said, “You came all this way alone? By yourself?”
“You are my king,” Edmund said. “I came to help you.”
Aethelstan drew a short breath. “Ethelred is gone?”
“No.”
“Then Ethelred is King.” He swung his arms around Edmund. “But what a man you are, for just a boy. I pray—” He looked around. It was beginning to rain. “I pray we come out of this alive. I pray we may save the kingdom.”
“There are Danes below, in the valley,” Edmund said.
“Yes, so we thought you were. We have been snaring them all day.” Aethelstan gripped his shoulders. “You’re here! What a wonder.” He looked out toward the west again. “These we’re seeing now are only the front edge, Edmund. I can see the smoke of the last place they burned.”
“We’ll be ready,” Edmund said. “God save us, we are in the right here.”
“I don’t know if that matters to God,” Aethelstan said. “You must be hungry.”
“I’m starving.”
“Come eat.”
* * *
“Why is there no fyrd come to help us?” Aethelstan said.
“They are slow to band together. They are coming. But the King—” Edmund bit his lips. “Only the King can lead the fyrd.”
“Where is the King?”
Edmund handed Reynard the jug. “He’s mad, Aethelstan. He can’t sleep, for fear of the ghost, and he sees her everywhere. Even old Alphege can’t help him this time.” He fisted his hands. “There is no king, not really.”
“The Queen?”
“She is in childbed, or near to. No one sees her but her most trusted women. They say her condition is very hard.”
Aethelstan grunted. His eyes shone in the fire, and he said, “The more brave, Edmund, that you came. God send us more such warriors. Let me show you something.” He got up, and they walked over along the edge of the down, looking west.
The long low hill sloped away into the valley. From its edge Edmund could see only the rainswept darkness to the west and south. Yet he could hear something, off in the distance. His hair stood on end. In the dark a great mass moved along over there from the west, slipping and sliding along, coughing and breathing, laughing and shouting. It seemed one vast slow flood, louder as it came nearer, under it all a low grumble of thousands of feet.
Even the coming of night did not stop it; it spilled on across the low ground like a tide.
Edmund thought, Maybe this is the end of the world. He had seen Ethelred screaming senselessly and tearing his hair out with his fists. He had seen the land as ruined as a burned-out place. The Danes were cutting the kingdom to pieces. Now this faceless mass rumbling through the dark toward the men on this lonely little hill.
Aethelstan said, quietly, “We cannot let them get by us.” Edmund said, “Can’t we strike, then?” He turned toward his brother.
Aethelstan pulled on his beard. “Spread out as they are, if all of us hit them at one place, we can punish them.”
“They’ll have to stop,” Edmund said. “To finish us off.”
For a moment Aethelstan was silent. Edmund was still hungry; he turned and looked back at the fire.
“I’m glad you came,” Aethelstan said. “You bring me to the sticking point. Good. I’ll find you a fresh horse. Come on.”
* * *
In the dark they slipped from the down in files, staying below the skyline. Most on foot, trampling the ground to mud, the Jomsvikings filled the narrow end of the valley. The rain fell steadily and hard. Almost at once, Aethelstan’s men came up against the edge of the Viking army and charged them.
Edmund, with a shield, his old sword, and a fresh horse, lunged and struck, and when at the first sho
ck of their charge the tall, axe-swinging men in front of him gave way, he pushed forward. His left arm began to ache. Quickly he lost all sense of where he was. His horse slipped and slithered on the mucky ground. The night was full of screaming, howls, the grunts of men falling. Aethelstan stayed hard by him; they defended each other. Something hacked across his foot.
Aethelstan had said, “Kill a few, and then back up on the down.” In the driving rain they hewed and slashed at shapes in the dark, drew back, and charged in at another angle. A stew of bodies banging together. The ground was soggy. His arms were too heavy to lift, and he breathed in sobs. The shouting of men and the screams and neighs of horses sounded all around him. They were surrounded – they could not escape to the down.
A wave of men attacked them, and they wheeled and flailed around them. Edmund’s horse dodged under him, and he nearly fell. The shield cracked under a blow that shivered his whole left arm. His hair was plastered to his face. His sword hit something – a tree, a body – and stuck, and he had to wrench it free. He lost the shield. A blow numbed his leg. He had no strength left, just lifting his sword took more than he had, and yet somehow he struggled it up and struck, and struck again.
Aethelstan wheeled and shouted something and Edmund turned with him. The horses were scrambling uphill. A horn blasted behind him. Blind in the rain, he fisted his hand in the horse’s mane and let it carry him up. He felt the hoofs under him reach level ground again, and he slid out of his saddle and hit the grass on his back, dazed.
Aethelstan knelt beside him. “Come. Come under cover. We’re safe now.”
“We’re never safe,” Edmund mumbled, but he got to his hands and knees and followed him.
Chapter Fourteen
Raef knew that the war was blazing in the south, close enough to Winchester to draw out his enemy. When all around him in his hall the people slept, he left his body and roamed across the light field. He floated in the dark, part of everything. Going there meant only going to that part of him. Then he sensed the Lady, and he drew himself together into a single point.
The land below him broke. In the valley between the downs, the stream of light splintered, corrupted, boiling, giving up a stench of blood and filth, the music crackling into a jagged edge of shrieks. They were fighting down there. Above it, churning in the dark, was a tower of vile smoke.
He saw her as a hole in the air, a great shapeless maw. From the disintegration of the light field below rose the glimmer of the dead souls. They disappeared into her, like sparks going out. He sailed in at her. She saw him coming and rose to meet him, vast, inchoate, filthy, choked with souls. He rose up above the storm clouds, and she followed, chasing him, trying to surround him.
Frantically he struggled toward open sky. He knew if she encompassed him, she would consume him too. They spun together in a great rising spiral. He dodged her, slipped past, and turned north again, toward Jorvik. She left him and swung wide back toward the battle, a great blurred rip in the darkness.
Separate, he could feel the light field punctured and riven around him. He wondered briefly if this was why it had not rained that summer, because the sky up here was empty.
He wheeled back. He was stronger now; she no longer shattered him. But he could not hurt her, could only deflect her, and that not for long.
This time, though, when he struck at her, she seemed to yield. It was a trap. When he pursued her, she closed on him, enveloped him.
Black stench surrounded him like a miasma. His eyes burned. He thrust his arms out, trying to find some gap, clawed for anything to hold on to. His mind shuddered. The smoke wrapped around him like a blanket, suffocating. He flung one arm over his head, and his hand slid into a cold so deep that it passed through him like an arrow. She was swallowing him.
With the last of his will he flung himself away, not backward, which seemed impossible, but ahead, which seemed like death.
For a moment he stood in a church full of men, Danes and Saxons both. There in front of them, before the altar, on a draped and cushioned throne, sat a young man he had never seen before with a gold crown on his head.
Almost at once the tidal grip of the field was drawing him backward. He slid back into the open air. She was gone. He hovered in the clear light. Dawn was coming. The battle was over. Then, a moment later, he was opening his eyes, back in his body, in his sleeping bench in his hall.
He lay still, breathing hard. Laissa lay beside him, watching him. Gemma had gone off somewhere else; he could hear her singing with Miru outside the bearskin curtain.
“You went away again,” Laissa said. “I never know if you’re coming back.”
He wiped his face on the tail of his shirt. The reek of the Lady still in his nostrils. He had failed again. He had learned much in Jorvik and he had some strength here, but against her he could not win. Then Laissa got hold of his left hand.
“What happened to you?”
He looked down and saw that half his hand was missing. The edge of his hand was smooth as ordinary skin from the knob of his wrist to the base of his index finger, but the three fingers beyond were gone.
His guts roiled. He remembered the cold, when he thrust that hand out. He thought, That was nearly all of me.
“Where is Gemma?” he said.
She held his hand tight in both of hers. “Miru will feed her. Raef – Raef—” She clutched his hand. “You can’t do this anymore. Please. Please. Promise me.”
He said, “I have to sleep, Laissa. Let me sleep.” He sank back onto the bench and rolled over with his back to the hall.
Yet he could not sleep, wondering what else he might do against the Lady. She was consuming the world, and in the end she would eat him too and everything he loved. He shut his eyes, rigid.
* * *
Edmund startled awake, hearing the shouts. “They’re coming— they’re coming—” He had been sleeping in his boots; all he had to do was seize his sword, and he rushed off toward his brother, at the edge of the down.
The day was breaking. The rain had stopped. Wraiths of mist rose up from the deep crevices of the sides of the down. In the cool, damp air the Danes were rolling up the steep slope of the down toward them, the front edge of a mass of bodies that filled the valley below.
They scrambled along, sometimes on all fours, always upward, clutching branches and brash and shrieking as they came. Aethelstan’s little band of men lined the down’s height, fighting before the Vikings reached them, hurling down rocks and chunks of dirt and screaming insults. Edmund braced himself, his sword in both hands. The first line of the ongoing round helmets rushed up toward him, and when their heads were even with his feet, he started swinging.
He hit one backward, and another went down; but still they came on. Their eyes were wild and fearless, and they clawed at him. The world narrowed to him and the gaping enemy face before him, and he fought to cleave it away. His blade slashed across an arm, blood spurted up, and when the man reeled back another leaped toward Edmund, an axe cocked in his hand.
Then below a horn blasted. And behind him, someone cheered.
“The fyrd – the fyrd has come—”
The wave of Danes was drawing back. Edmund, panting, stood where he was, wiping his hair back off his face. The slope below him was clear, the men down there rushing off to join the rest. He turned to the north.
He gave a glad yell. Down the wide end of the valley, another army was streaming, a tide of men like a river, and leading them was the great red banner of Alfred, the Dragon of Wessex.
“The fyrd!” Eadric Streona had finally brought the King’s army.
The two armies streamed together, their screaming like pipes in the distance. Most of the English were on foot, like the Vikings, but the front lines were mounted men, Eadric Streona’s carls. The two armies surged together on the ground between the downs, and the clash of their meeting rose, and at once men were falling and dying.
Edmund sucked in his breath; in the air above the fighting, a dark
cloud was gathering, like the smoke above a raging fire. Edmund’s sword slipped from his fingers. The men around him stared at him; they saw nothing. He said, “Look, look,” but they saw nothing. Lightning crackled through the cloud above the battle, streaking white through its midst. There was no thunder. The cloud rose, shot through with the lightning, towering high as the sun.
Edmund rubbed his eyes, wondering if he dreamed it – if he did not imagine the terrific surge of the battle somehow reflected in the clear blue sky, in this strange titanic storm. Then a wail went up from the other men.
The fyrd was breaking. At the far end of the battle, where the English had not yet even met the Danes, men were turning, were fleeing away, and now with a roar the Danes rushed forward, and the rest of the English army staggered and reeled back and wheeled around and ran.
Aethelstan on his horse galloped along the down, shouting. “Come – help – help them—” He charged off, streaming a line of other men, snatching up their swords and flinging themselves onto horses. Edmund ran to his horse. Aethelstan was far ahead of them now, was leading his men in a rush down the slope. Edmund veered his horse around to catch up with him.
The horse stumbled; he fell off. He kept hold of the reins, and he turned to vault up onto the saddle. Then, beyond, he saw the Danes spill over the rim of the down and rush toward him, and before he could draw a breath, they were on him.
* * *
Edmund could barely stand. He had eaten nothing for two days and drunk only ditch water. His hands were bound behind his back. The two Danes dragged him by the arms up to a campfire in the valley, where a tall man with a hooked nose was sitting on a barrel, drinking from a horn.
Kings of the North Page 17
