by Justin Hill
Next to him loomed Thorkel the Tall. The great warrior said nothing.
They had become as used to the queen’s procession as the defenders and Knut enjoyed the spectacle of a beautiful woman dressed in red and white, and the scent of incense that drifted from the city. From far off, he saw a handsome woman, nine years his senior, large-breasted, wide-hipped and with a white wimple pulled tight about her face.
‘She’s magnificent,’ he said.
Thorkel nodded as Queen Emma passed south towards the river walls, and the English cheers drifted towards them. ‘But she’s no virgin.’
Thorkel had once served Ethelred as a mercenary. He knew many of the men in court, and had low opinions of the lot. He had taken Ethelred’s unclipped coin and kept his mouth shut.
‘So why do they fight for Edmund?’ Knut asked, turning to the mighty Thorkel.
He shrugged. ‘They’re fools.’
‘How long till we break them?’
Thorkel took a long time answering. ‘Well, we do not have any engines of war, and the stone walls are too strong for us to storm.’
Thorkel fell silent and Knut turned to him. ‘So?’
‘We wait,’ Thorkel said, ‘and starve them. Or they sue for mercy. Or we threaten to burn and rase the place to the foundation timbers.’
Knut looked round to the other men about him, but none of them wanted to go against Thorkel’s opinion. ‘Eric?’ he said at last.
Eric of Hlathir was the son of Norse kings. He had strawberry-blond hair, freckles and bright blue eyes in a narrow and hawkish face.
Eric half laughed, but he spoke his mind. ‘Our ships have cut off the river. We have taken the southern side of the bridge. Once they start to eat their horses, they’ll see sense. Either that or disease will drive them out.’
‘And what of this princeling hiding out in the woods?’
The whole company laughed. Edmund led a dwindling war band, hated and hunted among his own people like badgers.
‘Eadric has caught ten of his men and killed them all. He is drawing in on the rebels. He has promised to bring his head.’
‘Can we trust him?’
Thorkel laughed for the first time. ‘Eadric? No. But then don’t trust any of them. They’re English.’
Knut promised a purse of gold to the man who brought him Edmund’s head. It was now June and still Queen Emma processed about the walls and still Lundenburh’s defenders hurled determined abuse at the Danes. Each time Thorkel was forced to put on mail and helm and lead an assault his men were repulsed more viciously than before and Knut’s temper began to wear and fray.
In the end Knut called for a parley. He came forward under peace oaths and saw the English leaders approaching.
‘Where is the woman?’ he said.
Eadric frowned. ‘She’s up there.’
Knut squinted towards the walls. He could see a glimpse of white.
‘So who are these lot?’
‘Eadwig, Edmund’s younger brother, and her elder son, Edward.’
Knut lost interest. ‘You go and talk to them. Ask them if they’re ready to surrender.’
Eadric came back half an hour later. His cheeks were red, and he was breathing quickly.
‘What did they say?’
‘No,’ Eadric edited.
Knut was irritated. ‘Next time say we want her to come.’
‘She will not come,’ the word came back when Knut offered parley a week later.
Knut laughed.
One day Knut was playing chess with Eric. The pieces were made of carved walrus ivory. Knut’s king had been surrounded by Eric’s warriors and his impatience was growing.
‘What is it?’ Knut snapped when one of his men interrupted.
‘There is a man outside who claims to know how Lundenburh shall fall. He claims to be able to open a gate where our men might break in.’
Knut’s father’s rise to power had been ruthless and bloody. There were skeletons all over Danemark to prove it and it was almost because of this that Knut disliked treachery of any kind. But traitors had their purposes. He had the man shown in. He was ugly and stooped, with grasping hands and a lisp. He spoke English in a manner that Knut could not understand.
‘What is he saying?’ Knut demanded.
Thorkel translated. The man’s name was Cuthbert and he claimed to be a shoemaker. He said that he knew the commander of one of the gates, who would open it to the Army for a certain weight of gold.
‘Hold out your hands,’ Knut said, and inspected the man’s open palms. They looked like a shoemakers hands. The man smelt of leather. Knut was satisfied. He gave him a purse of silver. ‘I shall make you a lord among men if you deliver Lundenburh to me.’
That night Eric led some of his best men along the stream to the culvert nearest to the gate. The signal was given and they made their way forward and were lost to sight.
Thorkel waited with his finest warriors. When the signal was given, they would charge the gate.
‘Lundenburh will be yours by dawn,’ he promised Knut.
The sound of distant shouts drifted across the fields. The unmistakable clang of steel. An hour later Eric limped into Knut’s tent. His arm was bandaged. His mail had been broken in two places and the padded undershirt showed through. His hair was matted, whether with sweat or blood it was too dark to tell. There was a smeared splatter of blood across his right cheek.
‘We were discovered,’ he said simply, tossed his helmet on to the floor. ‘They came at us from all sides. It was a trap. She was there. I lost twenty of my best men. They died bravely.’ He touched the broken mail links. ‘I killed the lad who did this.’
‘So they are not close to surrender,’ Knut said.
Eric winced as he sat down and one of the men began to unlace the thongs on his mail.
‘Are you sure it was her?’
Eric nodded.
‘It might have been a man dressed in white.’
Eric shook his head, and his smile was lopsided. ‘I know her voice. It was her. She screamed fury at us.’ Eric shuddered. ‘No man could stand against such fury.’
Next morning Eric did not get up from his bed. Three ribs were broken, and he came down with fever. He was carried into the war council, where he sweated and winced and said little.
‘We sit here while a woman holds Lundenburh against us and that upstart lad rides about the country unopposed,’ Knut said. His volume rose as he spoke, as his tension finally broke through. ‘And now I hear that Edmund was allowed into Wincestre last week and feted like a conqueror. He should have been caught and bound and brought to me. I am the king!’
With each day the news got worse. Edmund had been in Wincestre and Wilton, Bade and Beiminstre, adding men to his household guards. Knut would hang every man who betrayed him. He decided that it was time to remind the English of their oaths. It would serve as a warning to Dane and Englishman alike.
‘How large is his war band?’
Knut had more than eight thousand men.
‘Eric,’ he said, ‘stay here till you are rested, but take Lundenburh for me. Thorkel, we shall ride and hunt down this Edmund.’
So half the Army remained in Lundenburh with Eric of Hlathir, who had recovered from the fever but until his ribs mended was unfit for hard riding, while the other half rode in search of Knut’s rival.
At the head of the Army rode Thorkel, his red wool cloth tight across his broad chest, one enormous hand holding his reins, the other resting on the pommel of his sword.
‘Keep him close to you,’ Swein had warned Knut before he died. ‘He is as unpredictable as a sea wind.’
Knut made Thorkel swear that he would catch Edmund. Thorkel took his oaths seriously and there was no more terrifying man. His long, thin sundial nose had been broken at a sharp angle and veered across his face as the sun moved from east to west – as if finding his way to Edmund.
Thorkel burnt the halls of the Hastingas. He ravaged Leomynstre and Cicestre, and bur
nt the farms about Wincestre. The longer they plundered, the heavier the baggage train of mules and pack animals that carried the Army’s booty. It was rough wooing. The Danes quite enjoyed themselves. No shieldwall met them. No burg of brave warriors were thrown across the path. No man resisted; they cowered in their halls and prayed. The Danes took their pick of livestock, altarpieces, ale, stallions, hack-silver and a glut of slave girls.
‘We are here to catch the upstart, not stuff your gut,’ Knut told Thorkel one day when his men lay drunk in a hall they had plundered already. ‘The whole country is at stake.’
Godwin and Edmund wore out ten horses as they rode about Wessex trying to rally more men. Edmund wore mail and helm and a kingly sword, and Godwin carried the Wessex banner of the White Dragon. These tokens were like the bones of saints. Men stood about and stared in wonder at the banner that Alfred had carried in battle, and every king after him, from victory to victory. But the shadows of Alfred and Edward, Athelstan and Edgar loomed over the young men like the giants of old.
Edmund and Godwin still found it hard to persuade men to fight. At some halls they came too late, at others too soon, like the ill-timed guest who arrives when the ale is all drunk or yet unserved.
Men and women lined up to bicker with them.
‘Why should we fight so our neighbours can steal our lands?’ some said.
‘Who needs more corpses? We have enough maimed men for our shielings.’
‘I want my sons to grow old. I want peace and order, and if that means a Dane asking, then I shall take it.’
Sometimes they managed to tilt men’s anger away; other times they were less successful.
‘Only fools think that leaving their shield on the wall will save them,’ Godwin said as they left another untidy meeting. ‘Old age promises no man peace.’
The prominent families welcomed them surreptitiously. The more they had, the more they had to lose. They could not afford to take sides with either king. It was a cleft stick with a sharp edge. They listened and nodded and tugged their beards, and eventually their hearts were heavy and they promised aid: ‘No lord is dearer to me than those descended from the House of Cerdic.’ They had tears in their eyes. They had suffered so much anguish and despair, but at last they made deadly serious and solemn promises. ‘If you can raise the fyrds, I will come to your banner.’
‘If we can raise the fyrds!’ Edmund cursed when he and Godwin were alone. ‘Why doesn’t one of them stick out his dumb neck? If we could raise the fyrds, then we would not have to tramp about the country hiding in trees and begging men to come and fight.’
They sat and shook with frustration.
‘Set a date,’ Godwin said. ‘Set a date and a place and tell them that all their neighbours have pledged their support. They will be too fearful to be left behind, and that way we will gather a great fyrd.’
Throughout June and July the Army followed the rumour of Edmund’s path. Knut was restless. The same thegns who had made promises to Edmund lined up to swear their loyalty to Knut. ‘You swore oaths to me in Hamtun in March,’ Knut told the men kneeling before him. ‘No doubt you swore oaths to Edmund as well. Why should I believe you now?’
‘Edmund threatened us!’ they wailed.
‘And I threaten you!’ Knut told them. He stuck his chin out and glared at them. ‘I threaten you!’ he shouted.
They shrank away from him. There was not an honest man left among the English.
‘Three years ago your lords gave my father hostages. I took those men and cut the nose and ears and hands off each one. What should I do now to make you keep your oaths? Should I take your wives with me?’
The men’s faces went red and the Danish warriors laughed as the womenfolk fell to their knees and started beseeching Christ’s mercy.
They talked a lot about Christ and God and saints and angels, but Knut took a long time to calm down.
‘I tell you what I shall do,’ Knut said at last. ‘I shall trust you. Hear me? I shall trust you all to keep to your word, and as God is my witness, He shall judge you when the Doomsday comes. But if you fail me again, I shall let my war hounds loose upon the land and they will ravage and burn as if the Devil himself had come.’
The men bowed and scraped and Knut wanted to kick them.
‘Bring me Edmund’s head,’ he said, ‘or woe betide you all.’
Edmund was sly as a fox. Traitors came with word of his whereabouts, but each time the trap was set he managed to slip through. According to reports, his war band had grown, but they kept to byways and tracks, left the straight Roman roads deserted.
Thorkel’s frustration grew. The Army became more violent and ruthless as the summer continued. The Devil was not far off. He sat on each Dane’s shoulder as they meted out punishments, which became harder and crueller. They were like the farmer who scatters the ploughed field with seed, but the seed the Army sowed was grief and anger, fear and the stark lesson of unfaithful men hanging from gibbet trees.
Men wept as their halls were emptied, their daughters dragged off. ‘Forgive us,’ they wept, ‘for not resisting him. Save us and do not treat us so harshly!’ But Thorkel ignored them.
He rode ever at the Army’s fore, long shanks dangling down the flanks of his black cob, fingers twitching dangerously. He rode under a continual storm cloud, with ravens and crows around him and smoke at his heels, as if he was bringing the apocalypse – weighing the souls of his men down with sin.
That summer was cold and wet and gloomy. In the woods and fieldfringes, the first foxgloves began to bloom. Knut saw meadowsweet by his horse’s hooves as it drank from a stream and he thought of a day back in Danemark when he had been falconing with his father and had brought down a giant crane. The bird had been almost as large as Knut himself. He recalled how it had flapped its broken wings, trying to rise into the sky with the falcon’s claws embedded in its back. The thought disturbed Knut.
Where was that damned Edmund?
It was like trying to grasp stream water in your fist.
It was just after midsummer’s day when Eadric rode into the Danish camp as puffed up as a toad. ‘We have him!’ he said, and clapped his hands together. ‘We have him now!’
Knut looked up from the game of chess he was playing. He did not like Eadric and did not believe him, but Eadric seemed convinced.
‘I have a man with Edmund’s company. He is just one day ahead of us, riding north and west. He has sent out word that he will raise his banner at Penne.’
‘Where is Penne?’ Knut growled.
Eadric drew a map on the palm of his hand.
‘We are here, and Penne is there.’
‘You are sure?’
‘Sure.’
Eadric was like a cheap camp-whore, Knut thought, as he let the man speak: alluring, seductive, eager and grasping. ‘If we send men behind him here, we can ride up this valley here, then we shall bag him and his men and they’ll all be with Christ by the Sabbath.’
Thorkel came forward and the plan was repeated. Then local men came and listened and gave advice and drew a more accurate map in the dirt. Thorkel squatted down to ask which way the land around Penne lay. There were few men with more experience of war and campaigning than him. Eadric answered every question and at last Thorkel was satisfied.
He rose stiffly and nodded. ‘Good,’ he said, and the shadow from his sundial nose was at eight o’clock. ‘We have him now.’
The meeting place for Edmund’s war band was set at Cenwealh’s Mound, where the men of Sumersæton, Dornsætum and Wiltunscir traditionally met. Edmund brought his men to a rest in the dark shadows of the field-edge trees and waited in hope for loyal warriors to arrive. From the shoulder of the high ridge they had fine views back to the south and the rolling Sumersæton fields. To the west the land fell away to the Adelingi Marshes, and to the east lay the Stour Valley, while the Fosse Way went a little to the north.
Edmund strode to the fringes of the trees and looked about him. Godwin stepped
up behind him. This was the moment when all their hope – or fears – would be realised.
Before them lay an empty field. There was no smoke, no sign of smoke, no sign of the warriors they had hoped for. There was simply an empty field, the summer meadow just starting to turn to seed.
‘Where are they?’ Edmund said.
‘Well, they’re not here,’ Godwin said.
‘I can see that.’
Godwin said nothing. Ask a stupid question, he thought, get a stupid answer.
Edmund stalked about the field. They were all saddle-sore. There was no sign of a camp.
‘Not one.’
Godwin’s skin prickled. It all looked too quiet. His mind was full of possibilities. This was a trap. But to Edmund he said, ‘They will come.’
As they dismounted and made a fire, a few lads came out of the tree shadows. They were young men, in threes and fours, with their father’s swords, their grandfather’s helm and their neighbour’s shield. Few of them had mail shirts, though all had spears, whether they were made for hunting or fighting. This was not the great and noble company that Edmund needed.
‘They’re boys,’ Edmund said, when he had welcomed them all.
‘Not long ago we were boys,’ Godwin said.
On the second day Edmund’s men were preparing the night meal when armed warriors rode out of the trees at the bottom of the valley.
Edmund walked forward, thinking they were English, but then he saw the way they wore their hair and the emblems on their shields.
‘Danes!’ he said in shock.
‘The Danes!’ someone shouted. ‘We are betrayed!’
Someone thrust a bridle into Edmund’s hand. ‘Flee!’ he urged.
Edmund pushed him away. He was tired of constant flight. A sudden calm came over him. He was the anointed king. He had struggled years for this moment and would not be rushed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I will not fly without striking a blow against the foe.’
Despair made Edmund wild. Godwin ran up and saw the look in Edmund’s eye and understood. This was it. This is where it will end, he thought.
‘Take the hill ridge,’ he ordered. They would die here, but they would die well and with honour.