War Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Pray God we reach Ceaster first,’ Finan grunted.

  And just then that red-black western sky was split by white lightning, not a small strike, but a jagged, horizon wide splintering of massive brilliance that momentarily threw the whole landscape into vivid black and white. A moment later the sound arrived, a bellow of Asgard’s anger that rumbled overhead, crushing us with its noise.

  Snawgebland bridled, jerked his head up, and I had to soothe him. I let him stand a moment, feeling him tremble, then nudged him forward.

  ‘It’s coming,’ Egil said.

  ‘What? The storm?’

  ‘The battle.’ He touched his hammer.

  The lightning had struck over Wirhealum. What did that omen mean? That the danger came from the west? From Ireland where Anlaf had conquered his enemies and lusted after Northumbria? I spurred Snawgebland, wanting to reach Ceaster’s walls before the storm blew in from the sea. Another bolt of lightning slithered to earth, this one smaller, but much nearer, slashing down to the low hills and rich pastures of Wirhealum, the land between the rivers. Then the rain came. At first there were just a few scattered heavy drops, but then it began to fall in torrents, the noise so loud that I had to shout my warning to Egil. ‘This is a graveyard! A Roman one! Stay on the road!’

  My men were touching crosses or hammers, praying that the gods would not stir the dead from their long cold graves. Another sky-splintering shaft of lightning lit the walls of Ceaster ahead of us.

  It took long wet minutes to persuade the guards on the high Roman ramparts that we were friendly, indeed it was not till my son, the bishop, was summoned to the fighting platform above the massive arch that the garrison reluctantly unbarred the huge gates. ‘Who commands here?’ I shouted at one of the guards as we spurred through the gate tunnel that was lit by two sputtering torches.

  ‘Leof Edricson, lord!’

  I had never heard of him. I was hoping the city would be commanded by a man I knew, alongside whom I had fought, and a man who would help us find shelter. That, I realised, would be hard because the city was crowded with refugees and their livestock. We pushed through cattle and I slid from Snawgebland’s saddle in the familiar square that lay in front of Ceaster’s great hall. I gave the reins to Aldwyn. ‘You’ll have to wait here till we find quarters. Finan! Egil, Thorolf, with me. You too!’ I called to my son.

  I took Benedetta as well. A guard at the outer door moved to block her, but a scowl from me made him step hurriedly back and I escorted her into the vast hall that the Romans had built and where an enormous fire blazed in the central hearth. There must have been a hundred men in the hall, all of whom watched us sullenly. ‘A woman!’ one of them said indignantly. ‘The warrior’s hall is forbidden to women, except servants!’ He was a tall, thin man with a straggling grey beard and worried eyes. He pointed at Benedetta. ‘She must leave!’

  ‘Who are you?’ I demanded.

  He looked even more indignant, as if I should have known his name. ‘I would ask the same of you!’ he said defiantly, and then heard my name being whispered among the men behind him and his demeanour changed abruptly. ‘Lord,’ he stammered, and looked for a moment as though he would drop to his knees.

  ‘Leof Edricson?’ I asked. He nodded. ‘Mercian?’ Again he nodded. ‘And since when,’ I demanded, ‘has this hall been denied to women?’

  ‘It is the warriors’ hall, to be allowed in here is a privilege, lord.’

  ‘She just beat ten types of shit into a Dane,’ I said, ‘so that makes her a warrior. And I have three hundred other warriors who are wet, hungry and tired.’ I sat Benedetta on a bench close to the fierce fire. The rain beat on the high roof that was leaking in a dozen places, while far off to the west another burst of thunder rolled across the sky.

  ‘Three hundred!’ Leof Edricson said, then fell silent.

  ‘You have quarters for them?’

  ‘The city is full, lord.’

  ‘Then they’ll sleep in here, with their women.’

  ‘Women?’ he seemed shaken.

  ‘Especially the women.’ I turned to my son. ‘Fetch them. The servants can hold the horses.’

  He grinned, but just then the door to the hall opened and my eldest son, the bishop, entered, his priestly robe sopping wet. He looked at his brother, started to speak, then instead hurried towards me. ‘Father!’ he exclaimed. I said nothing. ‘You came!’ He sounded relieved. ‘So Father Eadwyn reached you?’

  ‘Who is Father Eadwyn?’

  ‘I sent him a week ago!’

  ‘You sent a Christian priest through Northumbria? Then you sent him to his death. Well done. What’s happening?’

  I had directed the last two words to Leof, but he seemed incapable of answering. It was my son the bishop who eventually replied, though neither he nor anyone else seemed to know much of what happened beyond Ceaster’s walls except that Ingilmundr, Æthelstan’s supposed friend, had ravaged all the land near the city. ‘Ingilmundr!’ I said bitterly.

  ‘I never trusted him,’ my son said.

  ‘Nor did I.’ But Æthelstan had trusted Ingilmundr, thinking that the handsome Norseman was proof that pagans could be converted into loyal Christians, but Ingilmundr must have been conspiring with Anlaf for months, and now he was stealing livestock and grain, burning farms and, worse, he had captured the small burh on the southern bank of the Mærse. ‘He captured Brunanburh?’ I asked, appalled.

  ‘I ordered the garrison to leave,’ Leof admitted. ‘It was small, they couldn’t have resisted an attack.’

  ‘So you just gave him the burh? You didn’t destroy the walls first?’

  ‘We destroyed the palisade,’ Leof said defensively, ‘but the important thing is to hold Ceaster until the king comes.’

  ‘And when will he come?’ I asked. No one knew. ‘You’ve heard nothing from Æthelstan?’ Still no one answered. ‘Does he know about Ingilmundr?’ I asked.

  ‘We sent messengers.’ Leof said. ‘Of course we did!’

  ‘And have you sent men to confront Ingilmundr?’

  ‘He has too many warriors,’ Leof answered miserably. I looked at his men and saw some were ashamed, but most just looked as frightened as their commander who was frowning as my bedraggled troops, accompanied by a score of women, crowded into the hall.

  ‘There was a time,’ I said, ‘when Mercians knew how to fight. Ingilmundr has joined the enemy, your job was to destroy him.’

  ‘I don’t have enough men,’ Leof answered pathetically.

  ‘Then you’d better hope I do,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe …’ my son, the bishop, said tentatively, then faltered.

  ‘Maybe what?’

  ‘Leof is surely right, father, that the important task is to make certain Ceaster doesn’t fall.’

  ‘The important task,’ I snarled, ‘is to make sure your precious Englaland doesn’t fall. Why do you think Ingilmundr rebelled?’

  ‘He’s a pagan,’ my son said defiantly.

  ‘And he’s trapped on Wirhealum. Think about it! He has only two ways to escape if Æthelstan comes with an army. He can flee by boat, or he can march past Ceaster and try to retreat northwards.’

  ‘Not if the king’s army is here,’ Leof insisted.

  ‘And he knows that. And he doesn’t have enough men to defeat Æthelstan, so why is he fighting? Because he knows he’ll have an army at his back soon. He’s no fool. He’s rebelled because he knows an army is coming to support him, and you’ve let him collect the grain and meat he’ll need to feed them.’

  Nothing else made sense to me. An army was coming, an army of angry Scots seeking revenge, and a horde of pagan Norsemen wanting plunder. And in the morning I would ride to discover if I was right.

  The storm had passed by daybreak, leaving a chill damp sky that slung short flurries of rain into our faces as we rode into Wirhealum. An old Roman road ran down the centre of the peninsula, going from Ceaster to the marsh-enclosed harbour at the north-western coast. Wirhealum, wh
ich I knew well, was a long stretch of land between the River Dee and the River Mærse, its coast edged with banks of mud and sand, its land cut with streams, but blessed with good pastures and low wooded hills. The northern half had been settled by Norsemen who had pretended to convert to Christianity, the southern half, nearer Ceaster, had been Saxon, but in the last few days they had been driven out, their homesteads burned, their granaries emptied, and their livestock stolen.

  Now, as I led almost all of my three hundred men into the wind and rain, we avoided the Roman road. For much of its length it ran in a wide, shallow valley between pastures that, in turn, were edged by low thickly-wooded ridges. An enemy could watch the road from those trees, could gather men in their shelter and then ambush us. I suspected we had already been seen; Ingilmundr was no fool and surely had men watching Ceaster, but I chose concealment rather than make things easy for him to ambush us, and so led my men through the trees along the eastern ridge. We went slowly, threading the oaks and beeches as we followed Eadric, Oswi and Rolla, who scouted ahead on foot. Eadric was the oldest, almost as old as I was, and he took the ridge’s centre. He was the best scout I had, with an uncanny ability to stay concealed and to spot enemies who were similarly hiding. Oswi, an orphan from Lundene, lacked Eadric’s knowledge of the countryside, but he was cunning and intelligent, while Rolla, a Dane, was sharp-eyed and cautious till it came to a fight when he turned as vicious as a weasel. He was on the eastern flank of the ridge, and it was Rolla who alerted us to our first sight of the enemy. He beckoned urgently. I held up my hand to halt my men, dismounted, and, with Finan beside me, walked to join Rolla.

  Finan was the first to respond. ‘Dear God,’ he breathed.

  ‘There’s a good few of them, eh?’ Rolla said.

  I was counting an enemy column that was following the track that edged the River Mærse. The rear of the column was still out of sight, but I reckoned we could see four hundred mounted men heading inland. To our left I could just see the remnants of Brunanburh, the fortress Æthelflaed had ordered built on the bank of the Mærse. Maybe Leof was right, I thought ruefully, and the garrison at Ceaster did not have enough men to face Ingilmundr’s Norsemen.

  ‘Are those bastards trying to get behind us?’ Finan asked.

  I shook my head. ‘Even if we were seen leaving Ceaster they wouldn’t have had enough time to assemble that force.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, lord,’ Rolla grunted.

  ‘Still more of them!’ Finan said, watching a new group of spearmen appearing past the burh’s ruins.

  I sent my son with six men to warn Ceaster that some five hundred enemy horsemen were heading inland. ‘Leof will do sweet nothing,’ Finan grumbled.

  ‘He can warn the nearest settlements,’ I said.

  The column slowly vanished. They had stayed on the coastal track, between the pasture land and the mudflats where dunlins, oystercatchers and curlews flocked. The tide was low. If they had wanted to trap us, I thought, they would have used the other ridge, hidden there by the trees and ready to cross the low wide valley to cut off our retreat. ‘We go on,’ I said.

  ‘If he’s sent five hundred men inland,’ Egil asked when I rejoined the horsemen, ‘how many does he have left?’

  ‘Maybe not enough,’ his brother Thorolf said wolfishly. Egil, the eldest of the three brothers, was thin, handsome, and amusing. He approached battle like a man playing tæfl, cautiously, thoughtfully, looking for an enemy’s weakness before he struck with serpent speed. Thorolf, two years younger, was all warrior; big, black-bearded, grim-faced, and never happier than when he had his long-hafted war axe in his hand. He went into battle like an enraged bull, confident in his size and skill. Berg, the youngest, whose life I had saved, was more like Egil, but lacked his oldest brother’s keen intelligence. He might have been the best sword-warrior of the three, all of whom were likeable, dependable, and skilled in battle.

  The three brothers now rode with me as we went still deeper into Wirhealum. To our right was the wide Mærse, its mudbanks white with birds, while to our left the rich pastures of the vale had given way to heathland across which the Roman road ran spear-straight. We had passed the last of the destroyed steadings and ahead of us we could see other farms still standing, meaning we were crossing the invisible line between the Saxon part of the peninsula and the Norse settlements.

  And for a time it seemed as if Wirhealum was at peace. We saw no more armed men.

  There was a moment, a heartbeat, when that wide landscape was almost as still and silent as a grave. Rooks flew towards the Mærse, far off to our left a child drove three cows towards a palisaded steading, while flood waters glinted in the wide shallow valley. A kingfisher flashed across a stream that twisted sinuously between its deep muddy banks. The stream was high after the recent rain, its water turbid and turbulent. On the far ridge the trees grew thick, the oak leaves golden, the beeches a fiery red, the leaves all heavy and still in the windless air.

  It was a strange moment. I felt as if the world held its breath. I was gazing at peace, at pasture, at the green good land that men wanted. The Welsh had owned this land once and they had seen the Romans come and the Romans go, and then the Saxons had come and they had bloodied the earth with sword and spear and the Welsh names had vanished because the Saxons took the land and gave it their own name. They called it Wirhealum which meant the pasture where the bog-myrtle grows, and I remembered Æthelstan, just a boy, killing a man beside a ditch thick with bog-myrtle, and how Æthelflaed, Alfred’s daughter, had once asked me to collect leaves of bog-myrtle because it kept the fleas away. But nothing had kept the Norse away. They came on bended knee, begging to be given poor land, swearing peace, and both Æthelflaed and Æthelstan had granted them pasture and steadings, believing their oaths of peace, and believing that in time they would bend their knee to the nailed god. We saw none of them except for the small girl driving her cattle.

  ‘Maybe they all went east,’ Egil suggested.

  ‘Five hundred men to invade Mercia?’

  ‘They’re Norsemen, remember,’ he said lightly.

  Eadric gestured us onwards. We were riding deeper and deeper into Norse land now, still hidden by the autumn trees, but betrayed by the birds that fled our approach. I was nervous. The enemy could outnumber us, surround us, trap us, but still there was no sign of that enemy. No birds flew in panic from the trees on the far ridge, no horsemen rode the Roman road or the track beside the Mærse. Then Rolla came back again. ‘Lord? You’ll want to see this.’

  We followed him to the tree line, again looking out across the Mærse and further, out to sea, and there I saw the ships. ‘Dear God,’ Finan breathed again.

  There were ships coming from the north, a fleet of ships. I counted forty-two, but there could have been more. There was scarce any wind so they were rowing, bringing men to the peninsula’s end, and the leading ships were already within bowshot of land. ‘Dingesmere,’ I said. ‘That’s where they’re going, Dingesmere.’

  ‘Dingesmere?’ Egil asked.

  ‘A harbour,’ I said, ‘a big one.’ It was a strange harbour at the seaward end of Wirhealum, a mostly shallow sea-lake edged with mud and rushes and approached by channels tangled with sandbanks, but Dingesmere was large enough and just deep enough at the lowest tides to hold a whole fleet of ships.

  ‘Want me to look, lord?’ Eadric asked.

  We were still too far away to see the wide marshes at the peninsula’s end, and I suspected that there were already hundreds of the enemy gathered there. I did not want to risk my men by leading them into a hornet’s nest, but I needed to know if there was already an army somewhere close to Dingesmere. ‘It might be too dangerous,’ I told Eadric reluctantly, ‘I suspect there’s an army there.’

  ‘There soon will be,’ Egil said, watching the far ships.

  ‘They’ll not see me, lord,’ Eadric said confidently. ‘Plenty of ditches to hide in.’

  I nodded. I almost told him to be careful, but that
would have been a waste of words because Eadric was always cautious. He was also good. ‘We’ll wait for you back there,’ I nodded down the ridge.

  ‘It’ll take a good time, lord!’

  ‘We’ll wait.’

  ‘Maybe dusk,’ he warned me.

  ‘Go,’ I said, smiling.

  We waited, watching the far ships. ‘They’re not coming from Ireland,’ Thorolf remarked, ‘they’re all coming from the north!’

  He was right. The ships, which were still appearing, were coming down the coast. It was possible that the Irish Norse had crossed the sea and made landfall too far north, but Norsemen did not make that kind of error. ‘It’s Constantine’s army,’ I said, ‘that’s what’s happening. It’s the Scots.’

  ‘In Norse ships?’ Thorolf grunted. The far ships had beast-heads, not crosses, on their prows, and their hulls were leaner than the heavier Scottish ships.

  ‘They’re allies,’ I said. ‘Anlaf is bringing Constantine’s army.’

  ‘But why?’ Egil asked. ‘Why don’t the Scots just keep marching?’

  ‘Because of the burhs.’ I explained how Æthelflaed had built a string of burhs on Mercia’s northern frontier. ‘How many men is Constantine bringing?’

  ‘Fifteen hundred?’ Finan guessed. ‘Maybe more if the blackshields are with him.’

  ‘And they’ll march past those burhs in a great long line,’ I said, ‘and he’s worried the garrisons will attack him.’ I turned Snawgebland. ‘We’ll go a mile or so back.’ If I was right, and if Anlaf’s ships were ferrying Scottish troops to Wirhealum, then Anlaf’s own army must already be ashore and we were too close to the peninsula’s end for comfort. I could only wait for Eadric now, but would wait a little closer to Ceaster, and so we went back through the autumn trees and there, with sentries watching the north, we dismounted and let the time pass. The wind freshened and the far ships hoisted their sails. By mid afternoon we must have seen a hundred and fifty ships, while far to the east the smoke rose from steadings being burned by the horsemen we had seen earlier.