The Empty Throne. Bernard Cornwell
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Mærse, concealed among winter-bare trees and watching his war-band pound south on the frost-hardened track beside the stream.
‘We should …’ Rædwald began.
‘Not yet,’ I interrupted him. I touched Raven-Beak, making sure she moved in her scabbard.
‘Not yet,’ Sihtric agreed.
‘Godric!’ I called, and my servant, a twelve-year-old boy named Godric Grindanson, spurred from where my men waited. ‘Spear,’ I said.
‘Lord,’ he said, and handed me the nine-foot-long ash pole with the heavy iron spearhead.
‘You ride behind us,’ I told Godric, ‘well behind us. You have the horn?’
‘Yes, lord.’ He held up the horn to show me. The sound of the horn would summon help from the sixty-five riders if things went wrong, though I doubted they could offer any real help if my small war-band was attacked by Haki’s grim horsemen.
‘If they’ve dismounted,’ Sihtric spoke to the boy, ‘you help drive their horses away.’
‘I should stay close to …’ Godric began, plainly about to plead that he should stay by my side and so join the fight, but he stopped abruptly when Sihtric backhanded him across the face.
‘You help drive the horses away,’ Sihtric snarled.
‘I will,’ the boy said. His lip was bleeding.
Sihtric loosened the sword in his scabbard. As a boy he had been my father’s servant, and doubtless he had wanted to fight alongside the grown men back then, but there was no quicker way for a boy to die than trying to fight a battle-hardened Norseman. ‘Are we ready?’ he prompted me.
‘Let’s go and kill the bastards,’ I said.
Haki’s war-band had turned west and ridden out of sight. They were following the stream that flowed into a tributary of the Mærse some two miles beyond the valley’s sharp westwards turn. There was a small hill where the two streams joined, nothing more than a long grassy mound like the graves the old people placed all across the land, and that was where Haki would die or be defeated, which, in the end, amounted to the same thing.
We spurred down the hill, though I was in no hurry because I did not want Haki’s men to look behind and see us. We reached the stream and turned south. We did not hurry, indeed I slowed down as Sihtric rode ahead to scout. I watched as he dismounted and as he found a place from where he could see westwards. He was crouching and holding up one hand to caution us, and it was some time before he ran back to his horse and waved us on. He grinned at me when we joined him. ‘They stopped a ways down the valley,’ he said, his voice sibilant because a Danish spear had taken his front teeth at the battle at Teotanheale, ‘then unslung their shields.’ They had ridden beneath us with their shields strapped on their backs, but Haki obviously expected trouble where the valley ended and so had taken the time for his men to prepare for a fight. Our shields were already on our arms.
‘They’ll dismount when they reach the valley’s end,’ I said.
‘Then form a shield wall,’ Sihtric said.
‘So there’s no hurry,’ I finished the thought and grinned.
‘They might hurry,’ Rædwald suggested. He was worried that the fight would start without us.
I shook my head. ‘There are sixty-five Saxons waiting for them,’ I told him, ‘and Haki might outnumber them, but he’ll still be cautious.’ The Norseman would have almost twice as many warriors as the waiting Saxons, but those Saxons were on a hill and already formed into a shield wall. Haki would have to dismount his troops a good distance away so he was not attacked while his men formed their own shield wall, and only when they were formed and when the horses were safely led away would he advance, and that advance would be slow. It takes immense courage to fight in the shield wall when you can smell your enemy’s breath and the blades are falling and stabbing. He would advance slowly, confident in his numbers but careful in case the waiting Saxons had laid a trap. Haki could not afford to lose men. He might reckon he could win the fight where the stream joined the larger river, but he would still be cautious.
The Irish Norse were spreading into Britain. Finan, my father’s companion, claimed that the Irish tribesmen were too formidable an enemy, and so the Norse were being pinned to Ireland’s eastern coast. Yet on this side of the sea, the land north of the Mærse and south of the Scottish kingdoms was wild land, untamed, and so their ships crossed the waves to settle in the valleys of Cumbraland. Cumbraland was properly a part of Northumbria, but the Danish king in Eoferwic welcomed the newcomers. The Danes feared the growing power of the Saxons, and the Irish Norse were savage fighters who could help defend Danish-held land. Haki was merely the last to arrive, and he had thought to enrich himself at Mercia’s expense, which is why we had been sent to destroy him. ‘Remember!’ I called to my men. ‘Only one of them is to survive!’
Leave one alive, that had always been my father’s advice. Let one man take the bad news home to frighten the others, though I suspected all Haki’s men were here, which meant the survivor, if there was one, would take the news of the defeat to widows and orphans. The priests tell us to love our enemies, but to show them no mercy, and Haki had earned none. He had raided the lands around Ceaster and the garrison there, sufficient to hold the walls, but not sufficient to hold the walls and send a war-band across the Mærse at the same time, had appealed for help. We were the help, and now we rode westwards beside the stream, which grew wider and shallower, no longer hurrying over rocks. Stunted alders grew thick, their bare branches bent eastwards by the unending wind from the far sea. We passed a burned farmstead, nothing left there now except the blackened stones of a hearth. It had been the southernmost of Haki’s steadings and the first we had attacked. In the two weeks since we had come to Ceaster we had burned a dozen of his settlements, taken scores of his cattle, killed his people and enslaved his children. Now he thought he had us trapped.
My stallion’s motion made the heavy golden cross that hung about my neck beat against my chest. I looked southwards to where the sun was a clouded silver disc in a fading sky and I sent a silent prayer to Woden. I am half a pagan, maybe less than half, but even my father had been known to say a prayer to the Christian god. ‘There are many gods,’ he had told me so often, ‘and you never know which one of them is awake, so pray to them all.’
So I prayed to Woden. I am of your blood, I told him, so protect me, and I was indeed of his blood because our family is descended from Woden. He had come to earth and slept with a human girl, but that was long before our people crossed the sea to take Britain. ‘He didn’t sleep with a girl,’ I could hear my father’s scorn as I rode, ‘he gave her a good humping, and you don’t sleep through that.’ I wondered why the gods no longer came to earth. It would make belief so much easier.
‘Not so fast!’ Sihtric called, and I stopped thinking about gods humping girls to see that three of our younger men had spurred ahead. ‘Fall back,’ Sihtric called, then grinned at me. ‘Not far, lord.’
‘We should scout,’ Rædwald advised.
‘They’ve had long enough,’ I said, ‘keep riding.’
I knew Haki would dismount his men to attack the waiting shield wall. Horses will not charge home into a shield wall, instead they will sheer aside, so Haki’s men would form their own shield wall to attack the Saxons who were waiting on the long low mound. But we would come from their rear, and horses will charge into the back of a shield wall which is never as tight as the front rank. The front rank is a wall of locked shields and bright weapons, the rear rank is where the panic starts.
We turned slightly northwards, clearing the spur of a hill, and there they were. The sun slanted bright from a gap in the clouds to light the Christian banners on the hilltop and glint from the blades waiting there. Sixty-five men, just sixty-five, a tight shield wall of two ranks on the hill crest beneath the cross-blazoned flags, and between them and us was Haki’s shield wall, still forming, and nearest to us and off to our right were his horses under the guard of boys. ‘Rædwald,’ I said, ‘three men