Sword Song: The Battle for London

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I told you,” I said.

  “A few of the rowers found weapons,” he said, dismissing their effort with a shrug. Then he pointed down into the Sea-Eagle’s bilge that was sodden with blood. Five men crouched there, shivering, and Finan saw my questioning look. “They’re Saxons, lord,” he explained why the men still lived.

  The five men were fishermen who told me they lived at a place called Fughelness. I hardly understood them. They spoke English, but in such a strange way that it was like a foreign language, yet I understood them to say that Fughelness was a barren island in a waste of marshes and creeks. A place of birds, emptiness, and a few poor folk who lived in the mud by trapping birds, catching eels, and netting fish. They said Olaf had captured them a week before and forced them to his rowing benches. There had been eleven of them, but six had died in the fury of Finan’s assault before these survivors had managed to convince my men that they were prisoners, not enemies.

  We stripped the enemy of everything, then piled their mail, weapons, arm rings, and clothes at the foot of Sea-Eagle’s mast. In time we would divide those spoils. Each man would receive one share, Finan would take three, and I would take five. I was supposed to yield one third to Alfred and another third to Bishop Erkenwald, but I rarely gave them the plunder I took in battle.

  We threw the naked dead into the trading ship where they made a grisly cargo of blood-spattered bodies. I remember thinking how white those bodies looked, yet how dark their faces were. A cloud of gulls screamed at us, wanting to come down and peck the corpses, but the birds were too nervous of our proximity to dare try. By now the ship that had been coming downtide from the west had reached us. She was a fine fighting ship, her bow crowned with a dragon’s head, her stern showing a wolf’s head and her masthead decorated with a raven wind-vane. She was one of the two warships we had captured in Lundene and Ralla had christened her Sword of the Lord. Alfred would have approved. She slewed to a stop and Ralla, her shipmaster, cupped his hands. “Well done!”

  “We lost three men,” I called back. All three had died in the fight against Olaf’s boarders, and those men we carried aboard Sea-Eagle. I would have dropped them into the sea and let them sink to the seagod’s embrace, but they were Christians and their friends wanted them carried back to a Christian graveyard in Lundene.

  “You want me to tow her?” Ralla shouted, gesturing at the trading ship.

  I said yes, and there was a pause while he fixed a line to the stem-post of the cargo ship. Then, in consort, we rowed northward across the estuary of the Temes. The gulls, emboldened now, were plucking at the dead men’s eyes.

  It was close to midday and the tide had gone slack. The estuary heaved oily and sluggish under the high sun as we rowed slowly, conserving our strength, sliding across the sun-silvered sea. And slowly, too, the estuary’s northern shore came into view.

  Low hills shimmered in the day’s heat. I had rowed that shore before and knew that wooded hills lay beyond a flat shelf of waterlogged land. Ralla, who knew the coast much better than I, guided us, and I memorized the landmarks as we approached. I noted a slightly higher hill, a bluff and a clump of trees, and I knew I would see those things again because we were rowing our ships toward Beamfleot. This was the den of sea-wolves, the sea-serpent’s haunt, Sigefrid’s refuge.

  This was also the old kingdom of the East Saxons, a kingdom that had long vanished, though ancient stories said they had once been feared. They had been a sea-people, raiders, but the Angles to their north had conquered them and now this coast was a part of Guthrum’s realm, East Anglia.

  It was a lawless coast, far from Guthrum’s capital. Here, in the creeks that dried at low tide, ships could wait and, as the tide rose, they could slip out of their inlets to raid the merchants whose goods were carried up the Temes. This was a pirates’ nest, and here Sigefrid, Erik, and Haesten had their camp.

  They must have seen us approach, but what did they see? They saw the Sea-Eagle, one of their own ships, and with her another Danish ship, both boats proudly decorated with beast-heads. They saw a third ship, a tubby cargo ship, and would have assumed Olaf was returning from a successful foray. They would have thought Sword of the Lord a Northmen’s ship newly come to England. In short, they saw us, but they suspected nothing.

  As we neared the land I ordered the beast-heads taken from stern and stem-posts. Such things were never left on display as a boat entered its home waters, for the animals were there to frighten hostile spirits and Olaf would have assumed that the spirits inhabiting the creeks at Beamfleot were friendly, and he would have been loath to frighten them. And so the watchers from Sigefrid’s camp saw the carved heads heaved off and they would have thought we were friends rowing homeward.

  And I stared at that shore, knowing that fate would bring me back, and I touched the hilt of Serpent-Breath, for she had a fate too, and I knew she would come to this place again. This was a place for my sword to sing.

  Beamfleot lay beneath a hill that sloped steeply down to the creek. One of the fishermen, a younger man who seemed blessed with more wit than his companions, stood beside me and named the places as I pointed at them. The settlement beneath the hill, he confirmed, was Beamfleot, and the creek he insisted was a river, the Hothlege. Beamfleot lay on the Hothlege’s northern bank while the southern bank was a low, dark, wide and sullen island. “Caninga,” the fisherman told me.

  I repeated the names, memorizing them as I memorized the land I saw.

  Caninga was a sodden place, an island of marsh and reeds, wildfowl and mud. The Hothlege, which looked to me more like a creek than a river, was a tangle of mudbanks through which a channel twisted toward the hill above Beamfleot, and now, as we rounded the eastern tip of Caninga, I could see Sigefrid’s camp crowning that hill. It was a green hill, and his walls, made of earth and topped with a timber palisade, lay like a brown scar on its domed summit. The slope from his southern wall was precipitous, dropping to where a crowd of ships lay canted on the mud exposed by low tide. The Hothlege’s mouth was guarded by a ship that blocked the channel. She lay athwart the waterway, held against the tides by chains at stem and stern. One chain led to a massive post sunk on Caninga’s shore, while the other was attached to a tree that grew lonely on the smaller island that formed the northern bank of the channel’s mouth. “Two-Tree Island,” the fisherman saw where I was looking and named the islet.

  “But there’s only one tree there,” I pointed out.

  “In my father’s day there were two, lord.”

  The tide had turned. The flood had begun, and the great waters were surging into the estuary so that our three ships were being carried toward the enemy’s camp. “Turn!” I shouted to Ralla, and saw the relief on his face, “but put the dragon’s head back first!”

  And so Sigefrid’s men saw the dragon’s head replaced, and the eagle’s beaked head put high on Sea-Eagle’s stem, and they must have known something was wrong, not just because we displayed our beasts, but because we turned our ships and Ralla cut the smaller cargo boat loose. And, as they watched from their high fort, they would have seen my banner unfurled from Sea-Eagle’s mast. Gisela and her women had made that flag of the wolf’s head, and I flew it so that the watching men would know who had killed the Sea-Eagle’s crew.

  Then we rowed away, pulling hard against that flooding tide. We turned south and west about Caninga, then let the strong new tide carry us upriver toward Lundene.

  And the cargo ship, its hold filled with blood-laced gull-pecked corpses, rode the same tide up the creek to bump against the longship moored athwart the channel.

  I had three fighting ships now while my cousin possessed fifteen. He had moved those captured boats upriver where, for all I knew, they rotted. If I had possessed ten more ships and had the crews to man them I could have taken Beamfleot, but all I had was three ships and the creek beneath the high fort was crammed with masts.

  Still, I was sending a message.

  That death was coming to Beamfleot. />
  Death visited Hrofeceastre first. Hrofeceastre was a town close to Lundene on the southern bank of the Temes estuary in the old kingdom of Cent. The Romans had made a fort there, and now a sizable town had grown in and around the old stronghold. Cent, of course, had long been a part of Wessex and Alfred had ordered the town’s defenses to be strengthened, which was easily done for the old earth walls of the Roman fort still stood, and all that had to be added was a deepening of the ditch, the making of an oak palisade, and the destruction of some buildings that were outside and too close to the ramparts. And it was well that the work had been completed because, early that summer, a great fleet of Danish ships came from Frankia. They found refuge in East Anglia, from where they sailed south, rode the tide up the Temes, and then beached their ships on the River Medwæg, the tributary on which Hrofeceastre stood. They had hoped to storm the town, sacking it with fire and terror, but the new walls and the strong garrison defied them.

  I had news of their coming before Alfred. I sent a messenger to tell him of the attack and, that same day, took Sea-Eagle down the Temes and up the Medwæg to find that I was helpless. At least sixty warships were beached on the river’s muddy bank, and two others had been chained together and moored athwart the Medwæg to deter any attack by West Saxon ships. On shore I could see the invaders throwing up an earthen embankment, suggesting that they intended to ring Hrofeceastre with their own wall.

  The leader of the invaders was a man called Gunnkel Rodeson. I learned later he had sailed from a lean season in Frankia in hope of taking the silver reputed to be in Hrofeceastre’s big church and monastery. I rowed away from his ships and, in a brisk southeast wind, hoisted Sea-Eagle’s sail and crossed the estuary. I hoped to find Beamfleot deserted, but though it was obvious that many of Sigefrid’s ships and men had gone to join Gunnkel, sixteen vessels remained and the fort’s high wall still bristled with men and spear-points.

  And so we went back to Lundene.

  “Do you know Gunnkel?” Gisela asked me. We spoke in Danish as we almost always did.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “A new enemy?” she asked, smiling.

  “They come from the north endlessly,” I said. “Kill one and two more sail south.”

  “A very good reason to stop killing them, then,” she said. That was as close as Gisela ever came to chiding me for killing her own people.

  “I am sworn to Alfred,” I said in bleak explanation.

  Next day I woke to find ships coming through the bridge. A horn alerted me. The horn was blown by a sentry on the walls of a small burh I was building at the bridge’s southern end. We called that burh Suthriganaweorc, which simply meant the southern defense, and it was being built and guarded by men of the Suthrige fyrd. Fifteen warships were coming downstream, and they rowed through the gap at high water when the tumult in the broken middle was at its calmest. All fifteen ships came through safely and the third, I saw, flew my cousin Æthelred’s banner of the prancing white horse. Once below the bridge the ships rowed for the wharves where they tied up three abreast. Æthelred, it seemed, was returning to Lundene. At the beginning of summer he had taken Æthelflaed back to his estates in western Mercia, there to fight against the Welsh cattle thieves who loved riding into Mercia’s fat lands. Now he was back.

  He went to his palace. Æthelflaed, of course, was with him for Æthelred refused to allow her out of his sight, though I do not think that was love. It was jealousy. I half expected to receive a summons to his presence, but none came and, next morning, when Gisela walked to the palace, she was turned away. The Lady Æthelflaed, she was informed, was unwell. “They weren’t rude to me,” she said, “just insistent.”

  “Maybe she is unwell?” I suggested.

  “Even more reason to see a friend,” Gisela said, staring through the open shutters to where the summer sun splattered the Temes with glinting silver. “He has put her in a cage, hasn’t he?”

  We were interrupted by Bishop Erkenwald, or rather by one of his priests, who announced the bishop’s imminent arrival. Gisela, knowing that Erkenwald would never speak openly in front of her, went to the kitchens while I greeted him at my door.

  I never liked that man. In time we were to hate each other, but he was loyal to Alfred and he was efficient and he was conscientious. He did not waste time with small talk, but told me he had issued a writ for raising the local fyrd. “The king,” he said, “has ordered the men of his bodyguard to join your cousin’s ships.”

  “And me?”

  “You will stay here,” he said brusquely, “as will I.”

  “And the fyrd?”

  “Is for the city’s defense. They replace the royal troops.”

  “Because of Hrofeceastre?”

  “The king is determined to punish the pagans,” Erkenwald said, “but while he is doing God’s work at Hrofeceastre there is a chance that other pagans will attack Lundene. We will prevent any such attack succeeding.”

  No pagans did attack Lundene, and so I sat in the city while the events at Hrofeceastre unfolded and, strangely, those events have become famous. Men often come to me these days and they ask me about Alfred for I am one of the few men alive who remember him. They are all churchmen, of course, and they want to hear of his piety, of which I pretend to know nothing, and some, a few, ask about his wars. They know of his exile in the marshes and the victory at Ethandun, but they also want to hear of Hrofeceastre. That is strange. Alfred was to gain many victories over his enemies and Hrofeceastre was undoubtedly one of them, but it was not the great triumph that men now believe it to have been.

  It was, of course, a victory, but it should have been a great victory. There was a chance to destroy a whole fleet of Vikings and to turn the Medwæg dark with their blood, but the chance was lost. Alfred trusted the defenses at Hrofeceastre to hold the invaders in place, and those walls and the garrison did their job while he assembled an army of horsemen. He had the troops of his own royal household, and to that he added the household warriors of every ealdorman between Wintanceaster and Hrofeceastre, and they all rode eastward, the army getting larger as they traveled, and they gathered at the Mæides Stana, just south of the old Roman fort that was now the town of Hrofeceastre.

  Alfred had moved fast and well. The town had defeated two Danish attacks, and now Gunnkel’s men found themselves threatened not just by Hrofeceastre’s garrison, but by over a thousand of Wessex’s finest warriors. Gunnkel, knowing he had lost his gamble, sent an envoy to Alfred, who agreed to talk. What Alfred was waiting for was the arrival of Æthelred’s ships at the mouth of the Medwæg, for then Gunnkel would be trapped, and so Alfred talked and talked, and still the ships did not come. And when Gunnkel realized that Alfred would not pay him to leave, and that the talking was a ruse and that the West Saxon king planned to fight, he ran away. At midnight, after two days of evasive negotiations, the invaders left their campfires burning bright to suggest they were still on land, then boarded their ships and rode the ebb tide to the Temes. And so the siege of Hrofeceastre ended, and it was a great victory in that a Viking army had been ignominiously expelled from Wessex, but the waters of the Medwæg were not thickened by blood. Gunnkel lived, and the ships that had come from Beamfleot returned there, and some other ships went with them so that Sigefrid’s camp was strengthened with new crews of hungry fighters. The rest of Gunnkel’s fleet either went to look for easier prey in Frankia or found refuge on the East Anglian coast.

  And, while all this happened, Æthelred was still in Lundene.

  He complained that the ale on his ships was sour. He told Bishop Erkenwald that his men could not fight if their bellies were churning and their bowels spewing, and so he insisted that the barrels were emptied and refilled with freshly brewed ale. That took two days, and on the next he insisted on giving judgment in court, a job that properly belonged to Erkenwald, but which Æthelred, as Ealdorman of Mercia, had every right to do. He might not have wished to see me, and Gisela might have been turned away fr
om the palace when she had tried to visit Æthelflaed, but no free citizen could be barred from witnessing judgments and so we joined the crowd in the big pillared hall.

  Æthelred sprawled in a chair that could well have been a throne. It had a high back, ornately carved arms, and was cushioned with fur. I do not know if he saw us, and if he did he took no notice of us, but Æthelflaed, who was sitting in a lower chair beside him, certainly saw us. She stared at us with an apparent lack of recognition, then turned her face away as if she was bored. The cases occupying Æthelred were trivial, but he insisted on listening to every oath-taker. The first complaint was about a miller who was accused of using false weights, and Æthelred questioned the oath-takers relentlessly. His friend, Aldhelm, sat just behind him and kept whispering advice into Æthelred’s ear. Aldhelm’s once handsome face was scarred from the beating I had given him, his nose crooked and one cheekbone flattened. It seemed to me, who had often judged such matters, that the miller was plainly guilty, but it took Æthelred and Aldhelm a long time to reach the same conclusion. The man was sentenced to the loss of one ear and a brand-mark on one cheek, then a young priest read aloud an indictment against a prostitute accused of stealing from the poor box in the church of Saint Alban. It was while the priest was still speaking that Æthelflaed suddenly griped. She jerked forward with one hand clutching at her belly. I thought she was going to vomit, but nothing came from her open mouth except a low moan of pain. She stayed bent forward, mouth open and with the one hand clasped to her stomach that still showed no sign of any pregnancy.

  The hall had gone silent. Æthelred stared at his young wife, apparently helpless in the face of her distress, then two women came from an open archway and, after going on one knee to Æthelred and evidently receiving his permission, helped Æthelflaed away. My cousin, his face pale, gestured at the priest. “Start again at the beginning of the indictment, father,” Æthelred said, “my attention wandered.”

  “I had almost finished, lord,” the priest said helpfully, “and have oath-takers who can describe the crime.”