Shieldwall

by Justin Hill

  Alderman Elfric of Sumersæton greeted Godwin as if they were bench-fellows. ‘Wulfnothson! It is a long way from Sorestone, is it not?’

  ‘Yes, lord,’ Godwin said.

  ‘The king will remember this, if we come through this alive.’

  ‘I pray we do come through it alive,’ Godwin said.

  Elfric looked up at the Danish lines and wrinkled his nose. ‘Look! Thorkel is in the middle and Eric on the left.’

  ‘It’ll be a fine day, Wulfnothson,’ Alderman Ulfcytel said as he strode past. ‘Chin up. Strike hard. Do not fear the foe!’

  As the English began to line up in battle array, Bishop Ednoth said the blessing. He was a fine sight, his purple gown showing beneath his mail, and a helmet with a golden cross worked into a noseguard. He crossed himself and many men crossed themselves as well, took a few brief moments to make peace with the Lord.

  Godwin needed to piss. The urge became so strong that he put his shield down for a moment to empty his bladder, but all that came was a few warm drops that fell into his trousers.

  Godwin stamped his feet. The knots on his shoes felt too tight one moment, too loose the next. He stamped his feet to calm himself, focused his mind on what he was about to go into, felt suddenly like a novice. ‘Fetch a shield,’ Caerl had once said to him, and Godwin felt his heart patter just like that day when he wanted to prove himself.

  He remembered the day Wulfnoth put a hilt into his hand.

  ‘Here,’ his father had said. ‘Like this.’

  Godwin took in a deep breath and let it out.

  Grant us victory this day, Godwin prayed silently. Let me die if you will grant England peace and protect my people. He watched for a sign, but he could not tell if God had heard.

  I will give up life, he said again, for an English victory.

  But the sun remained clouded, the wind still; no ravens circled in the sky; there was no shape in the clouds that gave a hint of God’s intentions.

  War bands were still coming along the dry land. They jostled forward, finding their places as Edmund drew up the two wings of his warhost and the reserve he intended to fling into the battle at the critical moment.

  Godwin did not like the long wait, no more than he had done when he was a defender. Come on, let’s get this bastard battle over with, he thought to himself, but Edmund paused for the monks to sing a psalm, the one that they had sung when Godwin was a boy: ‘Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheekbone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly.’

  When the singing was over Godwin stood at the front of the English and looked up at the Danes, who took the crest of the low slopes. They were tall and well-dressed, and did not look afraid. They looked eager for battle. The sight was sobering.

  Do not parry with the sword. Sword on sword will ruin a blade. Do not watch the enemy’s blade; watch his body and wait for an opening. Do not end up like Ulf Edwinson, he thought, remembered killing the thug who had claimed Contone, or Caerl, or your father.

  Godwin needed to piss again, but there was no time. He took his place at the front of the line and they moved forward and Godwin felt the field slope upwards.

  The Army waited, a line of painted shields, quartered with red and white, blue and green, black and yellow. Some were decorated with crosses; the bosses gleamed, the edges of axes and spears and swords had been freshly whetted; they gleamed with a cold white light. The Danes were silent till Edmund dressed the English lines one final time and then led them forward at a slow walking pace. The Army winded their war horns, hurled smooth, round estuary stones and roared their war cries. The English responded enthusiastically.

  By the horns of hell, Godwin thought as Edmund led them forward into the hail of deadly darts. Hell, hell, hell, he thought as each step brought the Danes closer. He could now make out faces among the mass of shields and lined himself up.

  When they were three spear lengths apart Godwin could smell the sweat and the fear, and he could see the features that made each Dane distinctive from the next. When he was clear which man he would face, Godwin’s mouth went dry.

  Christ help me, Godwin thought, and felt the sweat on his spear shaft as the distance between them closed to less than a single furlong. That’s one big, ugly bastard.

  Whenever warriors gathered about a fire, their conversation invariably found its way to battles they had fought in. They spoke with authority and claimed to know how a certain victory came about: the enemy’s left wing collapsed; a certain captain ran out of his store of courage; panic ensued and they ran and were cut down with wounds in their backs.

  ‘They’re all liars,’ Wulfnoth once told Godwin. ‘No man can tell what goes on a sword’s length from the end of his nose. He is hemmed in by a deathly ring of faces, all angry, snarling, cursing, as terrified as he. They might try and make sense of it later – in fact they must – but only the servants who watch from the horse pickets and baggage have any idea, and they are not fighting men and know much about how to saddle a horse or treat a lame hound, but little of battle.’

  On the fields between Carrenduna and Assandune that day, 18 October 1016, King Edmund Ironside met the veteran warriors of Knut of Danemark. Bitter the battle rush as fearsome companions drove against each other. Spittle and blood erupted and they came to a crashing halt and settled down to hew and stab over the war linden.

  ‘To the left!’ someone shouted, and Godwin shoved leftwards.

  Godwin had his best men all about him, shoulder to shoulder, brothers fighting as one. They did not withhold the blows; they hacked men to pieces, stood firm and resolute, steadfast before the foe; spear-shafts driving forwards; steel took life; the English crowned themselves with glory.

  ‘Kill him!’ Beorn hissed to men behind him.

  Godwin did not see the blow or the parry, but he heard a man scream and Beorn laughed, ‘Good!’ and someone else shouted something, and Godwin didn’t know who it was or what the hell he was saying, because he was trying to stab a Dane with crooked teeth and pale, staring blue eyes that gleamed over the rim of his shield.

  Beorn bared his war grin, a grim rictus, glaring at the enemy. He split the skull of a Dane to Godwin’s right. Ufi the dead man’s name, father to the twins Jorunn and Jodis, whom he would tickle by the hearth, and who stood on the milk cart to wave to their father on the day he left, and who would never know where their father ended his life.

  Beorn’s blow was so fierce that one of Ufi’s back teeth hit Godwin on the cheek.

  ‘Three!’ Beorn counted, and Ufi groaned as he fell and his corpse was trampled as his soul fled the earth’s small bounds.

  Godwin smiled for an instant, before a leering Dane with a wild blond beard rose suddenly up above the shield line and thrust his spear at Beorn’s face. Godwin saw the blow coming and it was his sword point that caught the Dane full in the face, knocking him back with a low grunt of pain. Then a spear point grazed Godwin’s helmet and he could hear the frantic shouting: ‘Left! Left!’

  Godwin had no idea why they were forcing themselves left, but left they went, pushing, hacking and stabbing, and they came up against a younger Danish war band that seemed less well armoured and experienced, and suddenly the killing was easier. Death took them all. Broad arms, a deluge of ghosts, driven grieving from the body.

  Godwin’s men were an efficient unit and they made quick work of this enemy, isolating the chief warriors and letting Beorn do the rest. He carried no shield himself, but used his long-hafted axe to swing over the shields into the heads of the men who stood against them.

  ‘Strike!’

  ‘Shove their shields apart!’

  ‘Get him! Fill him with holes!’

  Godwin’s war band talked to each other, working as a team, with Beorn’s axe cleaving the heads of the toughest Danes. Even a glancing blow was enough to shatter the bone-frame beneath mail and hauberk. Godwin laughed for the joy of it all. The poets were right: it was a glorious thing to fight i
n battle. They killed a man and then pushed over his body, pressing ever deeper into the Danish lines, dragging richly bejewelled Danes into their lines, where they were butchered and stripped of arm-rings and armour. These items were then displayed, the Danes taunted with the severed heads of their dead lord.

  All about them men were dying. Dead arms were weighed down with twisted gold; dead faces trodden underfoot; Death’s blade stropped and buffed as it scythed through the men on that ridge beneath the forested crown of Assandune Hill.

  It was not beer talking, Godwin thought, when we swore to drive the Danes from our land. He hacked a young Dane on the spear arm and heard the bone break, saw the lad’s face turn white as his arm flapped on a thread of skin. You chose the wrong man to fight this day, Godwin thought, as he broke the lad’s skull with a vicious blow from Næling.

  Alongside Godwin’s war band, Edmund and his men pushed ever deeper into the Army. Godwin paused to see his banner, high above the furious storm of steel. Knut’s banner was driven back; Edmund’s banner was twenty helmets to Godwin’s left. He risked a glance and saw Edmund’s silver boar helm gleaming under the flat grey sky. This shirt that shouldered heroes shall not jingle again, Godwin chanted and felt like a hero in the poems:

  Wayland wove this, fine-knit battle shirt

  Hung from a shoulder that shouldered warriors.

  The Danes pulled back, no more than a couple of spear lengths. Godwin held his men back. ‘Rest,’ he shouted. ‘Draw breath.’

  The two sides watched each other for a few brief moments before the English line crashed again into the Danes.

  ‘They’re too soft here. Let us find their best troops. Beorn!’ Godwin shouted. ‘Let us follow the king’s banner.’

  Edmund had still not committed his reserves, for there was a large group of mail-clad men standing in the centre of the battlefield, looking tense and ready.

  ‘Godwin!’ a voice shouted, and Godwin turned to see Abbot Wulsy, sweating profusely and wiping his brow with the back of his arm. ‘How goes it?’

  ‘Good,’ Godwin said. ‘Good.’

  ‘You’re going to leave some for us?’

  ‘Of course,’ Godwin said, and pointed up the low slope, about three furlongs distant, where the gentle ridge formed the spine of the battlefield. ‘That’s Knut’s banner there. Edmund has promised a pound of gold to any man who cuts him down. Fancy your chances?’

  ‘Not I! That’s for young men like yourself. But we’ll all do our part. By Christ’s blood!’ Wulsy looked up and screwed up his nose, as if he was considering how many Danes between him and it. ‘Well, no sense in delaying,’ he said. ‘Your father would be proud of you,’ he added as a parting shot, before leading his men, all fine warriors, straight into the fray with shouts of ‘Ironside! Ironside!’

  A while later Godwin paused. His cheek was sticky with blood, but he couldn’t remember being hit. ‘That Dane’s tooth cut me,’ he said, and Beorn grinned. Godwin loved that ugly smile. He grinned back.

  As far as they could see they were pushing the Danes back all along their side of the battle, but the lines had slowly edged to the left, so that the left wings were now fighting on the other side of the low ridge, and they could only see the tops of the banners, standing still in the battle lines.

  It looked good.

  ‘We shall feast tonight,’ Beorn said, and slapped Godwin’s arm.

  ‘They’re pinned back! Once we’ve driven them to the top of the hill we’ll be able to strike down upon them and they are sure to run.’

  Then suddenly there was a great shout and the Danish centre seemed to stem their retreat and a new war band charged into where the White Dragon flapped in the wind, and drove a wedge into the English line.

  ‘That is Thorkel the Tall,’ Beorn shouted. ‘He will cut the king off unless we help him! He escaped me once, not this time. My axe shall split the old giant’s ugly head.’

  Godwin led his whole company back into the fray as a bleeding thegn stumbled back towards them.

  ‘We met Thorkel the Tall and he and his men were very terrible,’ the thegn said, and Godwin rushed past.

  He was pushing right behind Edmund’s banner. They did not meet Thorkel but some Norman warriors, with shaven lips and cruel eyes and swords of the best Frankish steel. They cursed in a barbarous tongue as Beorn cut them down, and they bled like all men when pierced with steel. One of them seized Beorn’s axe head and tried to pull it from him. Another Norman tried to drag the shaft from his hand, but Beorn would not let go, even though they hacked at him. His mail shirt saved him and he shrugged off their blows and laughed as he grasped one by the throat and crushed the life from him.

  The battle wavered. At one point it seemed the Danes would break, at another the English. In rushed the men, like grains of wheat pouring into the mill when the sluice gate is opened – ground by the thousand to husks and bone-pale flour.

  Godwin saw Abbot Wulsy away to his right – helmet off, wolf-grey hair flying in the air – and realised that the abbot had been cut off and surrounded. ‘Help him!’ Godwin shouted to no one in particular, but he was far away and it was already too late. An axe caught the abbot on the back of the head and then he was lost from view and all Godwin could see were weapons hacking down in the space where the good monk had once stood.

  Suddenly a shiver seemed to run through the English as Thorkel led his berserker axemen in another terrible charge. The great Dane was like a maddened bull; bloody foam fell from his lips, he strode towards Godwin’s men, cutting men down with his berserkers all about him.

  ‘Stand firm!’ Godwin shouted. ‘We held him once. Beorn, is your axe ready!’

  ‘Ready!’ Beorn shouted.

  Godwin’s shield took three blows from Thorkel’s sword. The first split the rim; the second shattered the timbers; the third left Godwin with a boss and some splinters, that he rammed at Thorkel’s face and drove him back, Beorn swinging his axe with equal ferocity.

  Thorkel stepped back and then charged again. Eric of Hlathir charged too.

  Knut was terrified. ‘Charge!’ he told his veteran captains.

  Danes stood about Knut and the Black Raven banner and fell without taking a single step backwards. The English pressed to the crest of the hill. The last hill, Godwin thought. Such a small coastal hump, and the crest where Knut stood with his banner was only thirty paces away.

  Edmund pressed forward, Godwin with him. Their shieldwall held, and the Danes were like a maddened ram battering its head against the sheep-pen boards. War band after war band beat on the English shield-wall. Again and again the English threw them back, but they were making no headway. They had stalled. Godwin could feel the mood of the English fracturing. He looked suddenly for Edmund and could not see him.

  ‘Is he dead?’ someone asked.

  ‘Where is Edmund!’

  At that moment Thorkel and his men charged again, bellowing his war cry. It was like watching a weary timber suddenly snap. The English shieldwall broke. Thorkel’s men plunged deep into the English. The front ranks of warriors had been worn very thin and Thorkel battered his way through them into the ranks of boys and old men who made up the rear. Thorkel set about him, murdering children and greyheads. The shudder in the English ranks started a panic. Panic turned to terror, terror to flight. Godwin wanted to go back and seal the breach, but Knut saw his opportunity and all his great warriors charged.

  The Fates seemed uncertain to whom they should award victory. The English wavered, and Edmund mounted a horse, took off his helm and called out to the English.

  ‘Ironside!’ the shout went up. ‘Ironside!’

  Edmund swung his war sword. It flashed silver and red in the pale white daylight.

  The sight of him gave fresh heart to the English. They threw Eric of Hlathir and his Norse companions back upon their dead and wounded. The battle surged back and forth. Both shieldwalls broke. Edmund’s banner pushed to the brow of the hill, and Knut trembled behind his hearth compan
ions, who drew themselves up and prepared to sell their lives dearly.

  The fighting was terrible. Men fell and screamed and begged for mercy.

  ‘Remember the speeches we made on the benches! Now let us prove who is truly valiant,’ Edmund called.

  Godwin followed the king deep into the enemy. He could tell he was approaching the brow of the ridge. He was paces from the crest of the hill, Knut was fighting for life.

  ‘Remember your oath!’ Godwin shouted, but his voice was hoarse.

  ‘We’re winning.’ Beorn grinned. ‘We’re wearing those bastards down.’

  It seemed true. Godwin laughed and fought with renewed energy, but suddenly he turned and saw far to the left Englishmen flying from the battle.

  Why should they flee?

  ‘Stop!’ men shouted. ‘See we are winning.’

  It was an incredible sight. The battle seemed to stop as the Danes and English looked in wonder at the sight. Who ran from victory? the English thought. What chance was this? Knut wondered, and then saw Eadric’s banner leading the flight and laughed out loud, his grin flashing as he swung his sword in the air.

  Many Danes ran after Eadric, cutting men down, as wolves snag the deer by the hoof and bring it down. But the veteran Danish war chiefs kept their heads. With a swift strike into the English right flank they could win a glorious victory.

  Horns and shouts rang out. The war chiefs came together. They made a shieldwall, swung round like a door on its hinge and swept the exhausted and astonished English right wing before them.

  Alderman Elfric was first in line. ‘To me!’ he cried. ‘To me!’ and his men leapt to his defence. There was a fierce struggle but the Fates, the three giant maidens, Past, Present and Future, chose that moment to snap Elfric’s chin strap. They knocked the silver helmet from his head, left his glorious head exposed, and blows rained down.