We rode on south.
‘Two days,’ I said when we had left Lindcolne behind.
‘Two days?’ Sigtryggr asked.
‘Ragnall will find us in two days,’ I said.
‘With seven hundred men.’
‘More, probably.’
We had seen no sign of Ragnall’s marauding army, nor of any Mercian forces. There had been no far smear of smoke to show where an army lit campfires. There was smoke, of course, there is always smoke in the sky. Villagers kept their cooking fires burning and there were charcoal burners in the woods, but there was no massive haze of smoke betraying an army’s existence. The campfires of the Mercian army, if it even existed, would be far to the west, and that afternoon we left the Roman road and turned west. I was no longer marching to bring Ragnall to battle, but rather looking for help. I needed Æthelflaed’s warriors.
Late that afternoon we came to a woodland clearing where an abandoned hovel decayed. It might have been a forester’s home once, but now it was little more than a great heap of thatch covering a hole scraped into the clearing’s thin soil. We spent an hour chopping branches and heaping them over the thatch, then rode on westwards leaving two scouts behind. We followed no road, just cattle tracks that led forever towards the setting sun. We stopped at dusk and, looking back into the night-encroaching east, I saw the fire blaze sudden among the trees. The scouts had lit the thatch, and the blaze was a beacon to our enemies. My hope was that Ragnall would see the smoke besmirching the dawn sky and would ride eastwards in search of us while we rode on westwards.
The smoke was still there next morning, grey against a blue sky. We left it far behind as we travelled away from the rising sun. Our scouts rode well to the south of our path, but saw no enemy. They saw no friends either, and I remembered the argument in Ceaster’s Great Hall when I had wanted to ride out against the enemy, and every man there, except for Bishop Leofstan, had argued to remain in Ceaster. Was that what Æthelflaed had done? My son, if he had survived, must have reached Æthelflaed by now even if she was still sheltering in Ceaster, and was she so angry with me that she would leave us to die in these low hills?
‘What are we doing, father?’ Stiorra asked me.
The truthful answer? We were running away. The truthful answer was that I was heading west towards distant Ceaster in hopes of finding Mercian forces. ‘I want to draw Ragnall north,’ I said instead, ‘to where he’s caught between us and the Mercian army.’ That was also true. That was why I had led these men south from Eoferwic, but ever since Lindcolne I had been assailed by the fear that we were alone, that no Mercians stalked Ragnall, and we would have to face him alone. I tried to sound cheerful. ‘We just have to avoid Ragnall till we know the Mercians are close enough to help!’
‘And the Mercians know that?’
That was the proper question, of course, a question to which I had no proper answer. ‘If your brother reached them,’ I said, ‘yes.’
‘And if he didn’t?’
‘And if he didn’t,’ I said, no longer cheerful, ‘then you and Sigtryggr go north as fast as you can. Go and rescue your daughter, then find somewhere safe. Go across the sea! Just go!’ My last few words were spoken in anger, but I was not angry with my daughter, but at myself.
‘My husband doesn’t run away,’ Stiorra said.
‘Then he’s a fool,’ I said.
But I was the bigger fool. I had hammered young Æthelstan with advice, telling him not to be headstrong, to use his brain before he used his sword, and now I had led a small army into disaster by not thinking. I had thought to join a Mercian army, thought we could trap Ragnall between two forces, but I was the one who would be trapped. I knew Ragnall was coming. I could not see him or smell him, but I knew it. Every hour the suspicion grew that we were not alone in this innocent-looking countryside. Instinct was shrieking at me, and I had learned to trust instinct. I was being stalked, and there was no help at hand. There was no smoke from an army’s campfires in the sky, but nor would there be. Ragnall would rather freeze to death than betray his presence. He knew where we were, and we did not know where his army marched. That morning we saw his scouts for the first time. We had glimpses of far distant horsemen, and Eadger, who was the best of my scouts, led half a dozen men in pursuit of two such riders, but he was headed off by a score of mounted men. All he could report to me was that the larger group had been to the south. ‘We couldn’t get past the bastards, lord,’ he told me. He had tried, wanting to catch a glimpse of Ragnall’s army, but the enemy had baulked him. ‘But they can’t be far off, lord,’ Eadger said, and he was right. I thought of turning north, of going back to Eoferwic and hoping to outpace Ragnall’s pursuit, but even if we reached Eoferwic we would merely be trapped inside that city. Æthelflaed’s forces would never march that far into Northumbria to help us, there would be no rescue, just an assault on Eoferwic’s walls and a merciless slaughter in its narrow streets.
What had I thought? I had assumed that Æthelflaed would have sent men to harass Ragnall, that somewhere close to his army was a Mercian force of at least four or five hundred men who would join us. I had thought to astonish Æthelflaed with the capture of Eoferwic, to give her a new King of Northumbria sworn to keep peace with her and to offer her Ragnall’s blood-red banner as a trophy. I had thought to give Mercia a new song of Uhtred, but instead I was giving Ragnall’s poets a new song.
So I did not tell Stiorra the truth, which was that I had led her into disaster, but at midday it was surely obvious to all my men. We were riding a crest above a wide river valley. The river curled in great loops, running quietly to the sea between meadows thick with grass where sheep grazed. This was what we fought for, for this rich land. We were still heading west, following the ridge line above the river, though I had no idea of where we were. We asked a shepherd, but all he could say was ‘home’, as if that explained everything. Then, moments later as we paused at the top of a small rise, I saw horsemen far ahead. There were three of them. ‘Not ours,’ Finan grunted.
So Ragnall’s scouts were ahead of us. They were to our west, to our south, and doubtless behind us too. I glanced at the river. We were south of it. I supposed we could cross it somewhere and head north, but our horses were poor beasts, and if Ragnall was as close as I now suspected then he would easily overtake us and fight us on ground of his own choosing. It was time to go to earth and so I sent Finan and a score of men to find a place we could defend. Like a hunted beast I would turn on our pursuers and choose a place where we could maul the enemy before he overwhelmed us. A place, I thought, where we would die unless the Mercians came. ‘Look for a hilltop,’ I told Finan, who hardly needed the advice.
He found something better. ‘You remember that place where Eardwulf had us trapped?’ he asked me on his return.
‘I remember.’
‘It’s like that, only better.’
Eardwulf had led a rebellion against Æthelflaed, and he had trapped us in the remains of an old Roman fort built where two rivers met. We had survived that trap, saved by Æthelflaed’s arrival, but I was abandoning any hopes of rescue now.
‘The river bends ahead,’ Finan told me. ‘We have to cross it, but there’s a ford. And on the other bank there’s a fort.’ He was right. The place he had found was as good as I could have hoped for, a place made for defence, a place made, once again, by the Romans and, like Alencestre where Eardwulf had trapped us, a place where two rivers met. Both rivers were too deep for men to cross on foot, and between them was a square Roman earthwork that stood atop higher ground. The only approach was from the ford to the north, from the direction we had come, which meant Ragnall would be forced to march around the fort and cross the ford, and that would take time, time for a Mercian army to come and save us. And if no Mercian army came then we had a fort to defend and a wall on which to kill our enemies.
It was almost dusk when we filed our horses through the fort’s northern entrance. That entrance had no gate, it was just a track through the remains of
the earthwork which, like the old walls around Eads Byrig, had decayed under the assault of rain and time. There was no trace of any Roman buildings inside the fort, just a steading with a thickly thatched hall of dark timber and next to it a barn and a cattle shed, but there was no sign of any cattle, nor of any people except for an old man who lived in one of the hovels outside the fort wall. Berg brought him to me. ‘He says the place belongs to a Dane called Egill,’ he said.
‘Used to belong to a Saxon,’ the old man said. He was a Saxon himself, ‘Hrothwulf! I remember Hrothwulf! He was a good man.’
‘What’s this place called?’ I asked him.
He frowned. ‘Hrothwulf’s farm, of course!’
‘Where is Hrothwulf?’
‘Dead and buried, lord, under the soil. Gone to heaven, I hope. Sent there by a Dane,’ he spat. ‘I was just a lad! Nothing more than a lad. It was Egill’s grandfather that killed him. I saw it! Spitted him like a lark.’
‘And Egill?’
‘He left, lord, took everything with him.’
‘Left today,’ Finan said. He pointed to some cattle dung just outside the barn. ‘A cow shat that this morning,’ he said.
I dismounted and drew Serpent-Breath. Finan joined me, sword in hand, and we pushed open the hall door. The hall was empty except for two crude tables, some benches, a straw-filled mattress, a rusted cooking pot, a broken scythe, and a pile of threadbare, stinking pelts. There was a stone hearth in the hall’s centre and I crouched beside it and felt the grey ash. ‘Still warm,’ I said. I stirred the ash with Serpent-Breath’s tip and saw embers glowing. So Egill the Dane had been in the house not long before, but he had left, taking his livestock. ‘He was warned,’ I told Sigtryggr when I joined him on the earthen rampart. ‘Egill knew we were coming.’
And Egill, I thought, had been given time to take his cattle and possessions, which meant he must have been given at least a half-day’s warning, and that, in turn, meant Ragnall’s scouts must have been watching us since early that morning. I gazed north along the gentle ridge between the rivers. ‘You should take Stiorra north,’ I told Sigtryggr.
‘And leave you and your men here?’
‘You should go,’ I said.
‘I’m king here,’ he said, ‘no one chases me from my own land.’
The ridge to the north was flat-topped and ran between the two rivers, which joined just south of the fort. The ridge was mostly pastureland that dropped very gently away from us before rising, just as gently, to a band of thick woods where horsemen suddenly appeared. ‘They’re our scouts,’ Finan said as men put their hands on sword hilts.
There were six of them and they rode across the pasture together, and as they drew nearer I saw that two were injured. One slumped in his saddle, the other had a bloody head. The six men rode their tired horses to the fort’s entrance. ‘They’re coming, lord,’ Eadger said from his saddle. He jerked his head to the south.
I turned, but the land beyond the rivers was silent, still, sun-warmed, empty.
‘What did you see?’ Sigtryggr asked.
‘There’s a farmstead beyond those woods,’ Eadger pointed towards trees across the river. ‘At least a hundred men are there and more are coming. Coming from all over.’ He paused as Folcbald lifted the injured man down from his saddle. ‘A half-dozen of them chased us,’ Eadger went on, ‘and Ceadda took a spear in the belly.’
‘We emptied two saddles though,’ the man with the bleeding scalp said.
‘They’re well scattered, lord,’ Eadger said, ‘like they’re coming from east, west, and south, coming from all over, but they’re coming.’
For a wild moment I thought of taking our men and attacking the vanguard of Ragnall’s forces. We would cross the river, find the newly arrived men beyond the far wood, then slash havoc among them before the rest of their army arrived, but just then Finan grunted and I turned back to see that a single horseman had appeared at the northern tree line. The man rode a grey horse that he stood motionless. He was watching us. Two more men appeared, then a half-dozen.
‘They’re across the river,’ Finan said.
And still more men showed at the distant tree line. They just stood watching us. I turned and looked south, and this time I saw horsemen, streams of horsemen, following the road that led to the ford. ‘They’re all here,’ I said.
Ragnall had found us.
Thirteen
The first fire was lit not long after sunset. It blazed somewhere deep among the woods beyond the ridge’s pastureland, its flames flickering lurid shadows among the trees.
More fires were lit, one after the other, fires that burned bright in the northern woods that stretched between the rivers. So many fires that at times it seemed as if the whole belt of trees burned. Then, deep in the firelit night, we heard hooves on the ridge and I saw the shadow of a horseman galloping towards us, then turning away. ‘They want to keep us awake,’ Sigtryggr said. A second horseman followed, while off to the southern side of the ridge an unseen enemy clashed a blade against a shield.
‘They are keeping us awake,’ I answered, then looked at Stiorra, ‘and why didn’t you ride north?’
‘I forgot,’ she said.
Egill had left two spades in his barn and we were using them to deepen the old trench in front of the earthen wall. It would not be a deep trench, but it would be a small obstacle to an advancing shield wall. I did not have enough men to fight in the open pastureland, so we would make our own shield wall on what remained of the Roman rampart. The Romans, I knew, had made two kinds of fort. There were the great fastnesses like Eoferwic, Lundene or Ceaster that were defended by massive stone walls, and then there were these country forts, scores of them, which were little more than a ditch and a bank topped by a wooden wall. These smaller forts guarded river crossings and road junctions, and though the timbers of this fort had long disappeared, its bank of earth, despite its decay, was still steep enough to make a formidable obstacle. Or so I told myself. Ragnall’s men would have to negotiate the ditch, then clamber up the bank into our axes, spears, and swords, and their dead and wounded would make another barrier to trip men coming to kill us. The weakest point was the fort’s entrance, which was nothing but a flat track through the bank, but there were thorns growing thick by the river junction and my son took a score of men who hacked the bushes down and dragged them back to make a barricade.
Sigtryggr had looked around the fort before the sun set and the darkness shrouded us. ‘We could do with another hundred men,’ he had said grimly.
‘Pray he attacks us straight on,’ I had answered.
‘He’s no fool.’
We had sufficient men to defend one wall of the fort. If Ragnall came down the track that led across the pastureland and assaulted us head-on then I reckoned we could hold till what the Christians called doomsday. But if he also sent men to either side of the fort to attack the eastern and western walls we would be sorely stretched. Luckily the ground fell away towards the rivers on both sides, but the slopes were not impossibly steep, and that meant I would need men on both flanking walls, and more men on the southern wall if Ragnall’s forces surrounded us. The truth, and I knew it, was that Ragnall would overwhelm us. We would put up a fight, we would slaughter some of his best warriors, but by midday we would all be corpses or prisoners unless Ragnall obliged me by simply assaulting the northern wall.
Or unless the Mercians came.
‘We do have the hostages,’ Sigtryggr said. We were standing on the northern wall, watching the threatening fires and listening to the hacking sound of our spades deepening the ditch. Another enemy rode close to the fort, man and horse outlined by the glare of the fires burning in the distant wood.
‘We have the hostages,’ I agreed. The eight women were all wives of Ragnall’s jarls. The youngest was around fourteen, the oldest perhaps thirty. They were, unsurprisingly, sullen and resentful. We had them all in Egill’s hall, guarded there by four men. ‘What did he fear?’ I asked Sigtryggr.
‘Fear?’
‘Why did he take hostages?’
‘Disloyalty,’ he said simply.
‘An oath isn’t enough to make men loyal?’
‘Not for my brother,’ Sigtryggr said, then sighed. ‘Five years ago, maybe six, father led an army to the south of Ireland. Things didn’t go well, and half the army just took to their ships and sailed away.’
‘Which happens,’ I said.
‘If you’re capturing land, slaves, cattle,’ Sigtryggr said, ‘then men stay loyal, but as soon as there are difficulties? They melt away. Hostages are Ragnall’s answer.’
‘You take hostages from the enemy,’ I said, ‘not from your own side.’
‘Unless you’re my brother,’ Sigtryggr said. He was stroking a stone down the edge of his long-sword. The sound was monotonous. I gazed at the far woods and knew our enemies were also sharpening their blades. They had to be confident. They knew the dawn would bring them a battle, victory, plunder, and reputation.
‘What will you do with the hostages?’ Finan asked.
‘Show them,’ Sigtryggr said.
‘And threaten them?’ Stiorra asked.
‘They’re a weapon to use,’ Sigtryggr answered unhappily.
‘And you’ll kill them?’ Stiorra demanded. Sigtryggr did not answer. ‘If you kill them,’ my daughter said, ‘then you lose the power of them.’
‘It should be enough to just threaten their deaths,’ Sigtryggr answered.
‘Those men,’ Stiorra nodded her head towards the fires in the woodland, ‘know you. They know you won’t kill women.’
‘We might have to,’ Sigtryggr said unhappily. ‘One, at least.’
None of us spoke. Behind us, in the fort, men sat around campfires. Some of them sang, though the songs were not happy. They were laments. The men knew what faced them and I wondered how many I could rely on. I was sure of my own men and of Sigtryggr’s, but a quarter of the warriors had been sworn to Ragnall not a week or two before, and how would they fight? Would they desert? Or would their fear of Ragnall’s wrath persuade them to fight even harder for me?
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