Still protesting, but pleased that he might see the battle, Ecgfrith followed his mother up the steps onto the battlements. Here, on the east wall, there was no one, for the fire had not reached so far and all its sentries had been summoned, first to fight the fire and then to meet the invaders at the gate.
Eanflæd, still holding the boy’s hand, led him along the walkway. To her right, the wooden palisade that was embedded in the stone wall below it rose to head height. Every ten feet, a break in the palisade allowed for a sentry to see – and fire – down the almost sheer face of rock below. But there was no danger on that seaward side, so Eanflæd hurried past the arrow ports with barely a glance; she had to get a sight of what was happening at the gate.
At the north-east corner of the fortress, the wall ran steeply downhill to the gate. Reaching the point where it plunged downwards, Eanflæd stopped. Despite herself, she gasped, her hand going to her mouth. For she could see, as it were from above, the desperate struggle in the narrow passage up to the main body of the castle. The men were joined in a shouting, struggling, squirming mass, squeezed in between the confining walls. In such a fight, skill or courage or strength counted less than fortune, for all skill was reduced to a fatal slip on a bloodstained cobble. In amidst the struggling men, she searched for sight of Oswiu.
“Where’s Daddy?” Ecgfrith pulled her hand. “Where is he, Mummy?”
Eanflæd looked down at her son. In that instant, she saw for the first time the shadow face of her husband in his. But before she could answer, Ecgfrith pointed excitedly.
“I can see him! There he is, Mummy! There he is!”
She followed his finger and saw… Yes. Near the centre of the ragged line holding back Penda’s men. Ecgfrith had recognized him from the crest that ridged his helmet. Surrounded by his closest followers, Oswiu stood at the centre of the line, holding his shield against the tide of men pushing up the hill while he hacked and thrust with his sword into whatever gap appeared. By their shields and helmets, Eanflæd could tell that Ahlfrith and Æthelwin stood near him, the son by his father’s side, the warmaster holding the line fast against the wall, that none of the attackers should be able to outflank them.
But while Æthelwin held one wing, there was no one of his strength to hold the other. And as she watched, Eanflæd saw the right flank of the line, the side nearest to her, begin to crumble as the outward man stumbled, slipped and fell. It was a fall he tried desperately to scramble away from, but the Mercians were on him before he could get to his feet. Even from where they watched, Eanflæd heard the man’s cry as sword and seax ripped apart his stomach.
The queen looked on in horror, for the man leading the Mercians was standing back from the line and, seeing the opening, made for it himself, with his sword companions around him. The banner flying over his men was not Penda’s flag but a red hand, and she realized that these men were the hearth warriors of Penda’s son, the Red Hand.
“Mummy!” Ecgfrith pulled his mother’s hand. “We must go and help Daddy.” The boy drew his wooden sword from its scabbard.
From where they stood, high above the fight, Eanflæd called down into the inner ward. There were men there, fighting fires, who had not yet realized what was happening near the gate. But with the great noise of the fire, and the wind, her voice did not carry down to them.
The wind.
Eanflæd looked to the east, and through the gaps between the palisades felt the wind, harsh and cold upon her face. The wind had changed direction. It was blowing from the east. She glanced quickly at the west wall and saw the fingers of fire falling away from the walls. Without the wind to drive it up and over the stronghold, the fire was falling back. She could call all the men from fighting fires to push back the invaders at the gate.
“Quick,” she said to Ecgfrith. “Down to the courtyard. We must call the men to Daddy’s help.”
They turned back to the nearest steps.
“Where are you going?”
The swordsman, his blade pointing at them, smiled while behind him more men scrambled, breathless but whole, over the palisade.
Penda’s allies, the Britons of Gwynedd, had made the climb. They were in the castle.
*
Ahlflæd felt the change in the wind too. She was in the courtyard, directing men and women to fresh fire falls, smothering those that fell by stamping them out or, if the flames had caught, falling on them, so that the fire was extinguished by her thick red cloak.
But the wind’s change, swirling in cold eddies around the courtyard, meant that the streaming trails of sparks that had been spraying all over the tinder-dry buildings of the courtyard faltered and then stopped. Looking up, she saw the fire trails arch backwards, away from the castle. Thence she heard, faintly, cries of surprise and shock, as if fire rained down where it was not expected. But there were other cries, and closer, that she had not harkened to before. The princess turned her head, searching for their origin, and saw a blood-smeared, wild-eyed man stumbling up from the passage down to the gate, waving for aid.
Ahlflæd ran to him, but he fell. Reaching the warrior, she turned him over, but saw at once the cause for his falling – and that he would not rise again. Here, at the start of the defile down to the gate, the sounds came clearer to her: shouts, cries, metal striking metal.
The Mercians had broken through the gate. They were in the castle.
Ahlflæd grabbed the nearest man, an old servant still stamping out a sputtering fire.
“Get every man to the gate,” she told him. “The enemy is in.”
The old man turned horrified, smoke-teared eyes towards the passage, as if expecting to see a wave of men waving swords erupting from there at any moment.
“Go!” Ahlflæd screamed at him, pushing the old man towards where others still fought fires, then she herself turned and ran towards the passage.
“To me!” she screamed as loudly as she could. “To me, Idings! To the gate!”
Reaching the neck of the passage, Ahlflæd stopped and looked down the steep path. Where it widened, halfway down, men were struggling, and her quick, sharp eyes fast saw the crests of her father and her brother, standing shoulder to shoulder, holding the centre of the line. But she saw also the gap open on the right, as a man fell and the enemy began to push through, seeking to turn the flank of Oswiu’s shieldwall. Should they do so, then it would not matter that the wind had turned and the flames were being pushed back. The king would fall and the kingdom with him.
That banner. There, flying behind the Mercians. The Red Hand. Peada’s banner. He was here?
The princess looked back to the widening gap in the Idings’ shieldwall. The Mercians, the men fighting under the Red Hand, were pushing back the edge of the line, using their shields as rams to force the gap wider. And in that gap appeared a man she knew all too well.
Peada. Ahlflæd knew him from his armour and his helmet, for he had proudly displayed them to her the last time she had gone to Mercia. She knew him from the way he stood, and moved, head tracking to and fro like a pig snuffling for husks. She knew him from the depth of her contempt.
And she knew what she had to do to stop him.
Ahlflæd glanced back across the courtyard. Men were starting towards her, but they would have to cross the wide expanse of the inner ward to get to her before they started down to the gate. There was no time to wait.
Gathering her skirts up round her knees, Ahlflæd ran up the stairs and onto the top of the wall. She was on the west side of the passage to the gate. Peada could see her easily on top of the walkway. She ran along it, jumping from step to step as the wall snaked downwards along the line of the cliff.
“Peada!”
She was screaming at the top of her voice and waving her arms, doing all that she might to attract the attention of the Red Hand.
And he heard her. As the hole in Oswiu’s line widened, and Peada emerged with his hearth troops around him, he heard her. He turned and looked, and saw Ahlflæd standing on t
he edge of the walkway, shouting down to him. And he was not the only one who heard her. Even in the shieldwall, surrounded by the cries and shouts of his men, Oswiu heard his daughter’s voice, and he pulled back a little, and Ahlfrith with him.
The struggle had lasted many minutes already. And as was the way with such fights, it had its rhythms: pauses, while both sides took breath; resurgences, when they pushed anew. With Oswiu pulling back from the line, the Mercians facing him took the chance to breathe too, to tighten their line, to rest for a moment before the renewed push and the sweat-stung staring through the small, shifting gaps between the shields for an opening: an unprotected face, an exposed knee, a foot searching too far forwards for grip.
“Peada!” Ahlflæd called the Red Hand’s name again, but with the sudden slackening in the fight, it was not just Peada who looked to the princess standing upon the wall – all did.
“Peada, if you want me, stop.”
And Ahlflæd stepped to the edge of the walkway. Here, the wall rose high above the passage it protected, rising some forty feet above the stone.
“Stop, or you will never have me, Peada.” She put one foot out into space. “Never!”
“Wait!”
“Stop!”
The calls were in two voices: the voice of the Red Hand and the voice of her father. But she knew Oswiu would seek to stop her, and she paid him no heed. Instead, balancing before the fall, she looked to Peada and saw he held his hands up, as if he would catch her.
“Pull back, and you will have me, I swear. Stay, and watch me die.”
Peada, his hands still raised, looked up at Ahlflæd. He saw her: the fierce, wild girl who had outraced her brother and outfought him, the young woman with golden hair who had turned her face from his every attempt to impress and woo her. He saw her and he wanted her. His father had promised Ahlflæd to him, but he suddenly realized that this girl was not Penda’s to give. She was her own, and he wanted Ahlflæd to give herself to him. He wanted that more than glory and gold and the renown of men. He wanted her so he might live.
In that pause, as Peada stood caught between different lives, through the sudden silence that had fallen upon the battlefield there came the distant sound of cries, and screams, and hoarse, enraged shouting. The men standing with Peada, and the Red Hand himself, were tuned to those voices and accents: they were the sound of the men of their home. And they were calling out in panic and fear.
Something had happened to the main army – something terrible, for this was the sound of an army in rout.
The men behind Peada, those who had been eagerly crowding into the castle, hungry for gold and glory and the pick of the women, began to shift and look over their shoulders. Anxious voices asked downwards, to the men left to guard the shattered gate, what was happening, but they could give no news. Only that the stream of reinforcements coming to join the assault on the gate had suddenly ceased, leaving them alone in the castle, fearful of what had come to pass.
“Something’s happened.” Peada’s warmaster spoke to him as the Red Hand remained caught in indecision. “Outside the castle.” The warmaster looked round fearfully at the narrow passageway they had fought so hard to enter. “We could be trapped.”
Peada stared up at Ahlflæd. She still stood, poised before the fall. The wind was blowing her hair, and he realized she must have lost her headscarf, for her hair blew freely in a way he had not seen since she was a girl. He would have answered her, but his throat was too thick with feeling to speak.
“Lord, we have the queen!”
The shout broke across them all. Heads snapped to the other wall, there to see Queen Eanflæd and Ecgfrith the young ætheling standing before the swords of a small group of men upon the walkway.
“No!”
In the space when others stopped, unsure what to do, Oswiu acted.
“Get your sister,” he told Ahlfrith. He himself broke from the line and ran to the stairs.
The man holding Eanflæd saw the king climbing the stairs towards him. He saw the blood light on the man’s blade and knew it for a sword that would cut through his shield of leather and lime as if it were not there.
“Lord?” he called, seeking guidance as to what to do.
But Peada was looking back to where Ahlflæd stood on the brink of the fall. She had seen the queen brought, struggling, along the walkway, and had thought to push Peada into withdrawal before the queen’s captors could bring her to the struggle. Now they had, she had to push him harder.
“Peada, you will have me! Only let my family live.”
But as she spoke, she leaned forward. Now, only the grasp she had on a post kept her from falling – let that go and she would fall.
“Swear it!” The call came up from below. From Peada. “Swear it!”
“I…” The words stuck in her throat, but she forced them out. “I swear it.”
Peada raised his hand and grasped her pledge, then turned to his warmaster. “Let’s get out of here while we can.”
“What about them?” The warmaster pointed up at the men holding Queen Eanflæd captive. Men were starting to flood onto the passageway from the main body of the castle.
“They’re Britons,” said Peada. “Leave them.”
“Fall back! Fall back!” The warmaster gave the order and started pulling the men back. The Red Hand took one final look at Ahlflæd. Her brother had hold of her now, and was pulling her back onto the walkway.
But he had her promise.
Peada started back down the hill to the broken gate.
Oswiu came up onto the walkway. If the men holding his wife and his son had had any sense, they would have fought him from the top of the stairs, but already they were beginning to back away. Frightened eyes looked past him, to where the Mercians were beginning to pull back.
But swords still pointed at Eanflæd and Ecgfrith, and a knife was still held to the queen’s throat. And frightened men might do from fear what they would not from courage.
The king straightened from his crouched fighting stance. He sheathed his sword.
“Daddy, what are you doing? Kill them!” Ecgfrith struggled against the man holding him, trying to get free.
Oswiu held up his hands.
“I don’t want to kill anyone.” He looked into the frightened eyes of the man holding the queen. “Do you understand? I will not kill you. Only let her and the boy go.”
“If – if we let them go, what’s to stop you killing us?” The man’s eyes were darting this way and that, searching for some escape.
“If you harm them, I swear you will be begging me for death long before you die.” Oswiu pointed at the palisade. “But go the way you came, and you will live.”
The man glanced back at his comrades huddled behind him, and spoke sharply in his tongue. Immediately, some of them swung over the palisades, grasping the ropes they had hung down the walls.
“You will all follow,” said Oswiu. “But let them go.”
Seeing the first disappear over the walls, the others could not wait for them to reach the bottom but began immediately to follow, until only the two were left who held queen and ætheling hostage.
The man holding Ecgfrith could not stop himself: he looked over the palisade to see if there was space on the rope for him to follow and, in looking, he loosened his hold on the boy. Ecgfrith at once slipped free and ran towards his father. The other man, the one holding Eanflæd, heard the curse at his shoulder and saw an arm reaching forward to grab the escaping boy. But Eanflæd, seeing her son escaping, pushed his pursuer.
The man was on the edge of the walkway. The push was enough to send his foot over the edge. Wailing – even his scream had a musical edge – he fell.
Oswiu gathered the boy in his arms, then swiftly pushed him to the rear. He held up his hands again, open, without weapons.
“Don’t be like him,” he said, as the man holding the queen backed against the palisade, his knife paling the skin of her throat where it pressed. Oswiu pointed. “T
he rope. It’s there. Take it. Go.”
The man looked around desperately. He was cut off on the other side too, for Æthelwin, with more men, had come on that side.
“Swear it,” he said.
“I swear,” said Oswiu.
The man pushed Eanflæd so that she stumbled forward, teetering upon the edge. Grabbing the rope, he swung over the wall and started climbing down. Oswiu leapt to Eanflæd, grasping her arm and hauling her back before she could fall off. The queen clutched hold of him, her arms tight.
“I thought I was going to fall,” she said.
“So did I,” said Oswiu.
“Lord?” Æthelwin stood by the wall. He held a knife to the rope. From the way it quivered, there were still men climbing down it.
“I swore,” said Oswiu.
“I didn’t,” said Æthelwin.
Oswiu nodded.
The warmaster began to saw through the rope.
“No!” said Eanflæd. “You gave your word.”
“He tried to push you to your death.”
The warmaster paused, his knife held over the fraying rope.
“You mustn’t,” said Eanflæd.
But before Oswiu could render a decision, the final strands of rope broke.
The screams ended in the sound of flesh and bone striking rock. Then there came the moans.
“God decided for us,” said Oswiu. He stepped back from the queen’s arms. There was still much to do. He looked to Æthelwin. “Send someone to finish them off.”
The warmaster issued swift orders, while Oswiu looked to his queen. “I must go to see what has happened.”
Eanflæd gathered herself. “I would see also,” she said. Her voice trembled but a little. She held her hand out and Ecgfrith took it, but only for a moment. He ran to the wall and started to jump, trying to see over.
“Did you kill him, Daddy? Did you, did you?”
Laughing, Æthelwin lifted the boy and held him so he could see.
“He’s still moving,” Ecgfrith complained.
“Not for long,” said the warmaster.
“Come,” said Oswiu. With Eanflæd following, the king made his way down the stairs and across the courtyard. Only a few isolated fires still smouldered, rendering a storehouse and a workshop to ashes, but no longer were streams of sparks and embers falling on the castle.
Oswiu, King of Kings Page 33