The Burning Land (43 page)

The priest paused, then nodded. “But look after him,” he pleaded.

“I’ve told Steapa to look after him,” I told Coenwulf, “and I can’t do better than that.”

Father Pyrlig, dressed in his rusted mail, a sword at his waist and with an ax and a shield slung from his shoulders, came from the dark. “My men are ready,” he said. I had given him thirty men whose job was to carry the hives down the dark hill and across the moat.

I looked eastward. There was no sign of any new light there, but I sensed the short night was coming to its close. I touched Thor’s hammer. “Time to go,” I said.

Steapa’s men were making a racket at the hill’s foot, a noise to distract the Danes as hundreds of men now left the fort and, in the clouded darkness, went down the steep slope. In front were Edward’s men carrying the ladders. I saw the torches flaring at the moat’s edge and the flicker of arrow feathers whipping up toward the ramparts. The air smelled of salt and shellfish. I thought of Æthelflæd’s farewell kiss, of her sudden and impetuous embrace, and the fears surged in me. It sounded simple. Cross a moat, place the ladders on the small muddy ledge between moat and wall, climb the ladders. Die.

There was no order to our advance. Men found their own way down the hill and their leaders called softly to assemble them where the charred ruins of the village offered some small concealment. We were close enough to hear the Danes jeering as Steapa’s men with
drew. The torches that had been thrown to illuminate the ditch smoldered low. Now, I hoped, the Danes would stand down. Men would go to their beds and to their women, while we waited in the dark where we touched our weapons and our amulets and listened to the ripple of water as the tide drained from the wide marshes. Weohstan was out in the tussocked swamps and I had ordered him to display his men to the fort’s west in hope that some defenders would be drawn that way. I had two hundred other men to the east, ready to attack the beached ships at the creek’s farther end. Those men were commanded by Finan. I did not like losing Finan as my shield-neighbor, but I needed a warrior to seal the Danish escape, and there was no man so fierce in battle, nor so clearheaded, as the Irishman.

But neither Weohstan nor Finan could show themselves till dawn. Nothing could happen till dawn. There was a slight drizzle coming cold on a west wind. Priests were praying. Osferth’s men, carrying the furled sails, crouched among tall nettles at the edge of the village, just a hundred paces from the moat’s nearer bank. I waited with Osferth, a yard or so in front of Edward who spoke not a word, but just clutched the golden cross that hung at his neck. Steapa had found us and waited with the Ætheling. My helmet was cold on my ears and neck, and my mail coat felt clammy.

I heard Danes speaking. They had sent men to collect the spears after each of our feint attacks, and I supposed that was what they were now doing in the small light of the dying torches. Then I saw them, just shadows in shadows, and I knew the dawn was almost upon us as the gray light of death spread behind us like a stain on the world’s rim. I turned to Edward. “Now, lord,” I said to him.

He stood, a young man at battle’s edge. For a heartbeat he could not find his voice, then he drew his long sword. “For God and for Wessex,” he shouted, “come with me!”

And so the fight for Beamfleot began.

SIX

For a moment everything is as you imagined it, then it changes, and the details stand out so stark. Details of irrelevant things. Perhaps it is the knowledge that these small things may be the last you will ever see in this life that makes them so memorable. I recall a star flickering like a guttering candle between the clouds to the west, the clatter of arrows in the wooden quiver of a running archer, the shine of wolf-light on the Temes to the south, the pale feathers of all the arrows lodged ragged in the fort’s wooden wall, and the loose links of Steapa’s mail jangling and dangling from the hem of his coat as he ran to Edward’s right. I remember a black and white dog running with us, a frayed rope knotted about his neck. It seemed to me we ran in silence, but it could not have been silent. Eight hundred men were running toward the fort as the sun touched the earth’s rim with silver.

“Archers!” Beornoth shouted, “archers! To me!”

A few Danes were still collecting spears. One watched us in disbelief, his arms clutching a bundle of ash shafts, then he panicked, dropped the weapons, and ran. A horn sounded from the ramparts.

We had divided our men into troops, and each one had a purpose and a leader. Beornoth commanded the archers who assembled on our left, immediately in front of the bridge pilings that stood gaunt in the moat. Those archers were to harass the Danes on the ramparts, to pour arrows at them, to force them to duck as they tried to repel us with spears, axes, and swords. Osferth commanded the fifty
men whose job was to place the sailcloth ladders in the moat, and behind him came Egwin, a veteran West Saxon, whose one hundred men would carry the climbing ladders to the wall. The rest of the troops were to make the assault. As soon as the ladder carriers were across the moat the attacking troops were to follow, climb the ladders and trust in whatever god they had prayed to through the night. I had ordered the men into troops, and Alfred, who loved lists and order, would have approved, but I knew how soon such careful plans collapsed under the shock of reality.

The horn was challenging the dawn and the fort’s defenders were appearing on the ramparts. The men who had been collecting spears climbed the moat’s far side with the help of a rope lashed to a piling by the fort’s entrance, but one of them had the sense to slash through the rope before running into the fort. The great gates closed behind him. Our archers were shooting, but I knew their arrows would do small damage against mail coats and steel helmets. Yet it would force the Danes to use shields. It would cumber them, and then I saw Osferth’s men vanish into the moat and I bellowed at the following troops to wait. “Stop and wait!” The last thing I needed was a mass of men trapped in the moat’s bed, churning about under a hail of spears and impeding Osferth’s men. Better to let those men do their job and Egwin’s after them.

The bottom of the moat had sharpened stakes hidden beneath the low water, but Osferth’s men found them easy enough to haul from the soft mud. The latticed sails were unrolled on the opposite bank and their spars were anchored by spears that were thrust deep into the mud. A bucket of burning charcoal was thrown from the ramparts. I saw the bright fire fall then die in the wet muck below. The fire hurt no one and I suspected a Dane had panicked and emptied the pail too early. The dog was barking at the moat’s edge. “Ladders!” Osferth bellowed, and Egwin’s men charged forward as Osferth’s warriors hurled spears up at the high wall. I watched approvingly as the ladder carriers scaled the steep moat bank, then shouted for the assault troops to follow me to the newly placed ladders.

Except it was not like that. I try to tell folk what a battle is like,
and the telling comes out halting and lame. After a battle, when the fear has subsided, we exchange stories and out of all those tales we make a pattern of the fight, but in battle it is all confusion. Yes, we did cross the moat, and the rope netting of the spread sails worked, at least for a while, and the ladders reached the Danish wall, but I have left out so much. The welter of men thrashing in the ebbing tide, the fall of heavy spears, blood dark in dark water, screams, the sense of not knowing what happened, of desperation, of hearing the solid thumps of blades hurled from the parapet, the smaller sounds of arrows striking home, the shouts of men who did not know what was happening, men who feared death, men who bellowed at other men to bring ladders or to haul a spar back up the muddy bank. And then there was the mud as thick as hoof glue and just as sticky. Slick and slippery mud, men covered in mud and streaked with blood and dying in mud and always the Danes shrieking insults from the sky. The screams of men dying. Men calling for help, crying for their mothers, weeping on their way to the grave.

In the end it is the small things that win a battle. You can throw thousands of men against a wall, and most will fail, or they will cower beyond the ditch, or crouch in the water, and it is the few, the brave and the desperate, who fight through their fear. I watched a man carry a ladder and slam it against the wall and climb with a drawn sword, and a Dane poised his heavy spear and waited. I shouted a warning, but then the spear was driven straight down and the blade cut through the helmet and the man shook on the ladder and fell backward, blood sudden in the dawn and a second man thrust him out of the way, screamed defiance as he climbed and slashed a long-hafted ax at the spearman. At that moment, as the sun flooded the new day, it was all chaos. I had done my best to order the attack, but the troops were now mixed together. Some were standing up to their waists in the moat’s water, and all were helpless because we could not get the ladders to stay against the wall. The Danes, though they were dazzled by the new sun, were knocking the ladders aside with their heavy war axes. Some ladders, their rungs made from green wood, broke, yet still brave men tried to climb the high palisade. One of the sailcloth ladders slid back and
I watched men drag it back into place as the spears fell about them. More fire was thrown from the ramparts, the flare of it lighting helmets and blades, but men extinguished the embers by rolling in mud. Spears thudded into shields.

I picked up a fallen ladder and threw it against the wall and climbed, but a man cannot climb a ladder holding sword and shield, so my shield was slung on my back and I had to snatch at the rungs one by one with my left hand while holding Serpent-Breath in my right and a Dane caught hold of her blade with a gloved hand and tried to pull her from my grasp, and I ripped her backward and lost my balance and fell onto a corpse, and then Edward began to climb the same ladder. He wore a helmet circled with gold and surmounted by a plume of swan’s feathers that made him a target and I could see the Danes waiting to snatch him over the rampart so they could take his fine armor, but then Steapa knocked the ladder sideways so that the Ætheling fell into the mud.

“Dear God,” I heard Edward say in a mild voice, as though he had spilled some milk or ale, and that made me laugh. The handle of a thrown ax banged on my helmet. I turned, picked up the weapon, and slung it at the faces above me, but it went wide. Father Coenwulf helped Edward to his feet. “You shouldn’t be here,” I snarled at the priest, but he ignored me. He was a brave man for he wore no armor and carried no weapons. Steapa covered Edward with his huge shield as the spears hurtled down. Somehow Father Coenwulf survived the blades. He held a crucifix toward the jeering Danes and shouted a curse at them.

“Bring ladders here!” a voice bellowed. “Bring them here!” It was Father Pyrlig. “Ladders!” he shouted again, then he took a hive from one of his men and turned to the wall. “Have some honey!” he roared at the Danes and tossed the hive upward.

The wall was around ten feet high and it took strength to throw that sealed hive up over the parapet. The Danes cannot have known what the hive was, perhaps they mistook it for a boulder, though they surely knew no man could throw a boulder that far. I saw a sword slash at the hive, then it disappeared over the parapet. “Another!” Pyrlig shouted.

The first hive must have landed on the fighting platform. And it must have broken.

The hives were sealed. Brun had waited till the cool of the evening, when all the bees had returned home, and then he had closed off the entrances with mud and dung. Now the first hive’s shell, which was nothing but dried cow dung braced with hazel twigs, split like an eggshell.

And the bees came out.

Pyrlig threw a second hive and another man hurled a third. One failed to cross the parapet and fell back to the mud where, miraculously, it did not shatter. Two others were floating in the moat. I never did discover what happened to the rest of the hives, but the first two were sufficient.

Bees began to do our work. Thousands and thousands of angry, confused bees spread among the Danish defenders and I heard sudden shouts of startled pain. Men were being stung on their faces and hands, and the small distraction was all we needed. Pyrlig was bellowing at men to get the ladders set. Edward placed a ladder himself and tried to climb it, but Steapa thrust him aside and went first. I climbed another.

I cannot tell you how the fort at Beamfleot was taken, because I can recall nothing but the chaos. Chaos and bee stings. I do know that Steapa reached the top of the ladder and cleared a space by swinging a war ax so wildly that the blade very nearly slashed through my wolf-crested helmet, and then he was over the parapet and using the ax with murderous efficiency. Edward followed. Bees flickered all around him.

“Shout at your men,” I told him, “tell them to join you!”

He looked wild-eyed at me, then he understood. “For Wessex!” he shouted from the wall.

“For Mercia!” I bellowed, and now men were joining us fast. I did not feel the bee stings, though later I discovered I had been stung at least a dozen times, but we had been expecting to be stung, while the Danes were taken by surprise. They recovered fast enough. I heard a woman’s voice screaming at them to kill us, and I knew
Skade was close by. A group came along the platform and I faced them with shield and sword, took an ax strike on the shield and gouged Serpent-Breath into the man’s knee, and Cerdic was with me, and Steapa came to my left and we were screaming like demons as we forced our way along the wall’s wooden platform. A spear struck my helmet, knocking it askew. The sun was still showing beneath the clouds, casting a long-shadowed, dazzling brilliance, and its light flashed from sword-blade and ax-edge and spear-point, and I was shoving the shield into the Danes, stabbing Serpent-Breath past its edge, and Steapa was howling and using his massive strength to thrust the defenders aside, and everywhere, everywhere, were bees. A Dane tried to kill me with an ax blow that I took on my shield and I remember his open mouth, yellow stumps of teeth and bees crawling on his tongue. Edward, just behind me, killed that Dane with a sword thrust into his mouth so that the bees were washed out by the gush of blood. Someone had fetched the dragon banner of Wessex and was waving it from the captured parapet, and men were cheering as they crossed the moat and climbed the remaining ladders.