The Pale Horseman

by Bernard Cornwell

  “None!” a man called out.

  “No mercy!” Alfred shouted, and I knew he did not mean it. He would have offered every mercy to the Danes, he would have offered them the love of God and tried to reason with them, but in the last few minutes he had at last learned how to talk to warriors.

  “Tomorrow,” he shouted, “you do not fight for me! I fight for you! I fight for Wessex! I fight for your wives, for your children, and your homes! Tomorrow we fight and, I swear to you on my father’s grave and on my children’s lives, tomorrow we shall win!”

  And that started the cheering. It was not, in all honesty, a great battle speech, but it was the best Alfred ever gave and it worked. Men stamped the ground and those who carried their shields beat them with swords or spears so that the twilight was filled with a rhythmic thumping as men shouted, “No mercy!” The sound echoed back from the hills. “No mercy, no mercy.”

  We were ready. And the Danes were ready.

  That night it clouded over. The stars vanished one by one, and the thin moon was swallowed in the darkness. Sleep came hard. I sat with Iseult who was cleaning my mail while I sharpened both swords. “You will win tomorrow,” Iseult said in a small voice.

  “You dreamed that?”

  She shook her head. “The dreams don’t come since I was baptized.”

  “So you made it up?”

  “I have to believe it,” she said.

  The stone scraped down the blades. All around me other men were sharpening weapons. “When this is over,” I said, “you and I will go away. We shall make a house.”

  “When this is over,” she said, “you will go north. Ever north. Back to your home.”

  “Then you’ll come with me.”

  “Perhaps.” She heaved the mail coat to start on a new patch, scrubbing it with a scrap of fleece to make the links shine. “I can’t see my own future. It’s all dark.”

  “You shall be the lady of Bebbanburg,” I said, “and I shall dress you in furs and crown you with bright silver.”

  She smiled, but I saw there were tears on her face. I took it for fear. There was plenty of that in the camp that night, especially when men noticed the glow of light showing where the Danes had lit their fires in the nearby hills. We did sleep, but I was woken long before dawn by a small rain. No one slept through it, but all stirred and pulled on war gear.

  We marched in the gray light. The rain came and went, spiteful and sharp, but always at our backs. Most of us walked, using our few horses to carry shields. Osric and his men went first, for they knew the shire. Alfred had said that the men of Wiltunscir would be on the right of the battle line, and with them would be the men of Suth Seaxa. Alfred was next, leading his bodyguard that was made of all the men who had come to him in Æthelingæg, and with him was Harald and the men of Defnascir and Thornsæta. Burgweard and the men from Hamptonscir would also fight with Alfred, as would my cousin Æthelred from Mercia, while on the left would be the strong fyrd of Sumorsæte under Wiglaf. Three and a half thousand men. The women came with us. Some carried their men’s weapons; others had their own.

  No one spoke much. It was cold that morning, and the rain made the grass slippery. Men were hungry and tired. We were all fearful.

  Alfred had told me to collect fifty or so men to lead, but Leofric was unwilling to lose that many from his ranks, so I took them from Burgweard instead. I took the men who had fought with me in the Heahengel when she had been the Fyrdraca, and twenty-six of those men had come from Hamtun. Steapa was with us, for he had taken a perverse liking to me, and I had Father Pyrlig who was dressed as a warrior, not a priest. We were fewer than thirty men, but as we climbed past a green-mounded grave of the old folk, Æthelwold came to us. “Alfred said I could fight with you,” he said.

  “He said that?”

  “He said I’m not to leave your side.”

  I smiled at that. If I wanted a man by my side it would be Eadric or Cenwulf, Steapa or Pyrlig, men I could trust to keep their shields firm. “You’re not to leave my back,” I said to Æthelwold.

  “Your back?”

  “And in the shield wall you stay close behind me. Ready to take my place.”

  He took that as an insult. “I want to be in the front,” he insisted.

  “Have you ever fought in a shield wall?”

  “You know I haven’t.”

  “Then you don’t want to be in the front,” I said, “and, besides, if Alfred dies, who’ll be king?”

  “Ah.” He half smiled. “So I stay behind you?”

  “You stay behind me.”

  Iseult and Hild were leading my horse. “If we lose,” I told them, “you both get in the saddle and ride.”

  “Ride where?”

  “Just ride. Take the money,” I said. My silver and treasures, all I possessed, were in the horse’s saddlebags. “Take it and ride with Hild.”

  Hild smiled at that. She looked pale and her fair hair was plastered tight to her scalp by the rain. She had no hat, and was dressed in a white shift belted with rope. I was surprised that she had come with the army, thinking she would have preferred to find a convent, but she had insisted on coming. “I want to see them dead,” she told me flatly. “And the one called Erik I want to kill myself.” She patted the long, narrow-bladed knife hanging from her belt.

  “Erik is the one who—” I began, then hesitated.

  “The one who whored me,” she said.

  “So he wasn’t the one we killed that night?”

  She shook her head. “That was the steersman of Erik’s ship. But I’ll find Erik, and I won’t go back to a convent till I see him screaming in his own blood.”

  “Full of hate, she is,” Father Pyrlig told me as we followed Hild and Iseult up the hill.

  “Isn’t that bad in a Christian?”

  Pyrlig laughed. “Being alive is bad in a Christian! We say people are saints if they’re good, but how few of us become saints? We’re all bad! Some of us just try to be good.”

  I glanced at Hild. “She’s wasted as a nun,” I said.

  “You do like them thin, don’t you?” Pyrlig said, amused. “Now I like them meaty as well-fed heifers! Give me a nice dark Briton with hips like a pair of ale barrels and I’m a happy priest. Poor Hild. Thin as a ray of sunlight, she is, but I pity a Dane who crosses her path today.”

  Osric’s scouts came back to Alfred. They had ridden ahead and seen the Danes. The enemy was waiting, they reported, at the edge of the escarpment, where the hills were highest and where the old people’s fort stood. Their banners, the scouts said, were numberless. They had also seen Danish scouts, so Guthrum and Svein must have known we were coming.

  On we went, ever higher, climbing into the chalk downs, and the rain stopped, but no sun appeared for the whole sky was a turmoil of gray and black. The wind gusted from the west. We passed whole rows of graves from the ancient days and I wondered if they contained warriors who had gone to battle as we did, and I wondered if in the thousands of years to come other men would toil up these hills with swords and shields. Of warfare there is no end, and I looked into the dark sky for a sign from Thor or Odin, hoping to see a raven fly, but there were no birds. Just clouds.

  And then I saw Osric’s men slanting away to the right. We were in a fold of the hills and they were going around the right-hand hill and, as we reached the saddle between the two low slopes, I saw the level ground and there, ahead of me, was the enemy.

  I love the Danes. There are no better men to fight with, drink with, laugh with, or live with. Yet that day, as on so many others of my life, they were the enemy and they waited for me in a gigantic shield wall arrayed across the down. There were thousands of Danes, spear Danes and sword Danes, Danes who had come to make this land theirs, and we had come to keep it ours. “God give us strength,” Father Pyrlig said when he saw the enemy who had begun shouting as we appeared. They clashed spears and swords against limewood shields, making a thunder on the hilltop. The ancient fort was the right wing of the
ir army, and men were thick on the green turf walls. Many of those men had black shields and above them was a black banner, so that was where Guthrum was, while their left wing, which faced our right, was strung out on the open down and it was there I could see a triangular banner, supported by a small cross staff, showing a white horse. So Svein commanded their left, while to the Danish right, our left, the escarpment dropped to the river plains. It was a steep drop, a tumbling hill. We could not hope to outflank the Danes on that side, for no one could fight on such a slope. We had to attack straight ahead, directly into the shield wall and against the earthen ramparts and onto the spears and the swords and the war axes of our outnumbering enemy.

  I looked for Ragnar’s eagle-wing banner and thought I saw it in the fort, but it was hard to be certain, for every crew of Danes flew their standard, and the small flags were crowded together and the rain had started to fall again, obscuring the symbols, but off to my right, outside the fort and close to the bigger standard of the white horse, was a Saxon flag. It was a green flag with an eagle and a cross, which meant Wulfhere was there with that part of the Wiltunscir fyrd that had followed him. There were other Saxon banners in the enemy horde. Not many, maybe a score, and I guessed that the Danes had brought men from Mercia to fight for them. All the Saxon banners were in the open ground; none was inside the fort.

  We were still a long way apart, much farther than a man could shoot an arrow, and none of us could hear what the Danes were shouting. Osric’s men were making our right wing as Wiglaf led his Sumorsæte fyrd off to the left. We were making a line to oppose their line, but ours would inevitably be shorter. The odds were not quite two Danes to one Saxon, but it was close. “God help us,” Pyrlig said, touching his crucifix.

  Alfred summoned his commanders, gathering them under the rain-sodden banner of the dragon. The Danish thunder went on, the clattering of thousands of weapons against shields, as the king asked his army’s leaders for advice.

  Arnulf of Suth Seaxa, a wiry man with a short beard and a perpetual scowl, advised attack. “Just attack,” he said, waving at the fort. “We’ll lose some men on the walls, but we’ll lose men anyway.”

  “We’ll lose a lot of men,” my cousin Æthelred warned. He only led a small band, but his status as the son of a Mercian ealdorman meant he had to be included in Alfred’s council of war.

  “We do better defending,” Osric growled. “Give a man land to defend and he stands, so let the bastards come to us.” Harald nodded agreement.

  Alfred cast a courteous eye on Wiglaf of Sumorsæte who looked surprised to be consulted. “We shall do our duty, lord,” he said, “do our duty whatever you decide.” Leofric and I were present, but the king did not invite our opinion so we kept silent.

  Alfred gazed at the enemy, then turned back to us. “In my experience,” he said, “the enemy expect something of us.” He spoke pedantically, in the same tone he used when he was discussing theology with his priests. “They want us to do certain things. What are those things?”

  Wiglaf shrugged, while Arnulf and Osric looked bemused. They had both expected something fiercer from Alfred. Battle, for most of us, was a hammering rage, nothing clever, a killing orgy, but Alfred saw it as competition of wisdom, or perhaps as a game of tafl that took cleverness to win. That, I am sure, was how he saw our two armies, as tafl pieces on their checkered board.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “They expect us to attack!” Osric said uncertainly.

  “They expect us to attack Wulfhere,” I said.

  Alfred rewarded me with a smile. “Why Wulfhere?”

  “Because he’s a traitor and a bastard and a piece of whore-begotten goat shit,” I said.

  “Because we do not believe,” Alfred corrected me, “that Wulfhere’s men will fight with the same passion as the Danes. And we’re right, they won’t. His men will pull back from killing fellow Saxons.”

  “But Svein is there,” I said.

  “Which tells us?” he asked.

  The others stared at him. He knew the answer, but he could never resist being a teacher, and so he waited for a response. “It tells us,” I supplied it again, “that they want us to attack their left, but they don’t want their left to break. That’s why Svein is there. He’ll hold us and they’ll launch an assault out of the fort to hit the flank of our attack. That breaks the right of our army and then the whole damned lot come and kill the rest of us.”

  Alfred did not respond, but looked worried, suggesting that he agreed with me. The other men turned and looked at the Danes, as if some magical answer might suggest itself, but none did.

  “So do as Lord Arnulf suggests,” Harald said. “Attack the fort.”

  “The walls are steep,” Wiglaf warned. The Ealdorman of Sumorsæte was a man of sunny disposition, frequent laughter, and casual generosity, but now, with his men arrayed opposite the fort’s green ramparts, he was downcast.

  “Guthrum would dearly like us to assail the fort,” the king observed.

  This caused some confusion for it seemed, according to Alfred, that the Danes wanted us to attack their right just as much as they wanted us to attack their left. The Danes, meanwhile, were jeering us for not attacking at all. One or two ran toward our lines and screamed insults, and their whole shield wall was still banging weapons in a steady, threatening rhythm. The rain made the colors of the shields darker. The colors were black and red and blue and brown and dirty yellow.

  “So what do we do?” Æthelred asked plaintively.

  There was silence and I realized that Alfred, though he understood the problem, had no answer to it. Guthrum wanted us to attack and probably did not care whether we went against Svein’s seasoned warriors on the left of the enemy line or against the steep, slippery ditches in front of the fort’s walls. And Guthrum must also have known that we dared not retreat because his men would pursue and break us like a horde of wolves savaging a frightened flock.

  “Attack their left,” I said.

  Alfred nodded as though he had already come to that conclusion. “And?” he invited me.

  “Attack it with every man we’ve got,” I said. There were probably two thousand men outside the fort and at least half of those were Saxons. I thought we should assault them in one violent rush, and overwhelm them by numbers. Then the weakness of the Danish position would be revealed, for they were on the very lip of the escarpment and once they were forced over the edge they had nowhere to go but down the long, precipitous slope. We could have destroyed those two thousand men, then re-formed our lines for the harder task of attacking the three thousand inside the fort.

  “Employ all our men?” Alfred asked. “But then Guthrum will attack our flank with every man he has.”

  “Guthrum won’t,” I said. “He’ll send some men to attack our flank, but he’ll keep most of his troops inside the fort. He’s cautious. He won’t abandon the fort, and he won’t risk much to save Svein. They don’t like each other.”

  Alfred thought about it, but I could see he did not like the gamble. He feared that while we attacked Svein the other Danes would charge from the fort and overwhelm our left. I still think he should have taken my advice, but fate is inexorable and he decided to imitate Guthrum by being cautious. “We will attack on our right,” he said, “and drive off Wulfhere’s men, but we must be ready for their counterstroke and so our left stays where it is.”

  So it was decided. Osric and Arnulf, with the men of Wiltunscir and Suth Seaxa, would give battle to Svein and Wulfhere on the open land to the east of the fort, but we suspected that some Danes would come from behind the ramparts to attack Osric’s flank and so Alfred would take his own bodyguard to be a bulwark against that assault. Wigulf, meanwhile, would stay where he was, which meant a third of our men were doing nothing. “If we can defeat them,” Alfred said, “then their remnant will retreat into the fort and we can besiege it. They have no water there, do they?”

  “None,” Osric confirmed.

  “So they’re
trapped,” Alfred said as though the whole problem was neatly resolved and the battle as good as won. He turned to Bishop Alewold. “A prayer, bishop, if you would be so kind.”

  Alewold prayed, the rain fell, the Danes went on jeering, and I knew the awful moment, the clash of the shield walls, was close. I touched Thor’s hammer, then Serpent-Breath’s hilt, for death was stalking us. God help me, I thought, touching the hammer again, Thor help us all, for I did not think we could win.

  THIRTEEN

  The Danes made their battle thunder and we prayed. Alewold harangued God for a long time, mostly begging him to send angels with flaming swords, and those angels would have been useful, though none appeared. It would be up to us to do the job.

  We readied for battle. I took my shield and helmet from the horse that Iseult led, but first I teased out a thick hank of her black hair. “Trust me,” I said to her, because she was nervous, and I used a small knife to cut the tress. I tied one end of the hair to Serpent-Breath’s hilt and made a loop with the other end. Iseult watched. “Why?” she asked.

  “I can put the loop over my wrist.” I showed her. “Then I can’t lose the sword. And your hair will bring me luck.”

  Bishop Alewold was angrily demanding that the women go back. Iseult stood on tiptoe to buckle my wolf-crested helmet in place. Then she pulled my head down and kissed me through the gap in the faceplate. “I shall pray for you,” she said.

  “So will I,” Hild said.

  “Pray to Odin and Thor,” I urged them, then watched as they led the horse away. The women would hold the horses a quarter mile behind our shield wall and Alfred insisted they went that far back so that no man was tempted to make a sudden dash for a horse and gallop away.