The Last Kingdom Series Books 4-6: Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings. Bernard Cornwell
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brother. ‘Come and die!’ I shouted at him, and Erik answered my anger with a sad look. He nodded to me, as if to acknowledge that custom forced me to threaten him, but that the threat in no way diminished his regard for me. ‘Come on!’ I goaded him, ‘come and meet Serpent-Breath!’
‘In my own time, Lord Uhtred,’ Erik called back, his courtesy a reproof to my snarl. He stooped beside his wounded brother, and Sigefrid’s plight had persuaded the enemy to hesitate before attacking us again. They hesitated long enough for me to turn and see that Steapa had beaten off the attack from the inside of the city.
‘What’s happening on the bastion?’ I asked Osferth.
He stared at me with pure terror on his face. ‘Thank you, Lord Jesus,’ he stammered.
I rammed my left fist into his belly. ‘What’s happening up there!’ I shouted at him.
He gaped at me, stammered again, then managed to speak coherently. ‘Nothing, lord. The pagans can’t get up the stairs.’
I turned back to face the enemy. Pyrlig was holding the bastion’s top, Steapa was holding the inner side of the gate, so I had to hold here. I touched my hammer amulet, brushed my left hand over Serpent-Breath’s hilt, and thanked the gods I was still alive. ‘Give me your shield,’ I said to Osferth. I snatched it from him, put my bruised arm through the leather loops, and saw the enemy was forming a new line.
‘Did you see Æthelred’s men?’ I asked Osferth.
‘Æthelred?’ he responded as though he had never heard the name.
‘My cousin!’ I snarled. ‘Did you see him?’
‘Oh yes, lord, he’s coming,’ Osferth said, giving the news as though it were utterly unimportant, as if he were telling me that he had seen rain in the distance.
I risked turning to face him. ‘He is coming?’
‘Yes, lord,’ Osferth said.
And so Æthelred was, and so he did. Our fight more or less ended there, because Æthelred had not abandoned his plan to assault the city, and now brought his men across the Fleot to attack the rear of the enemy, and that enemy fled north towards the next gate. We pursued for a while. I drew Serpent-Breath because she was a better weapon for an open fight, and I caught a Dane who was too fat to run hard. He turned, lunged at me with a spear, and I slid the lunge away with my borrowed shield and sent him to the corpse-hall with a lunge of my own. Æthelred’s men were howling as they fought up the slope, and I reckoned they might easily mistake my men for the enemy and so I called for my troops to return to Ludd’s Gate. The arch was empty now, though on either side were bloodied corpses and broken shields. The sun was higher, but the clouds still made it look a dirty yellow behind their veil.
Some of Sigefrid’s men died outside the walls and such was their panic that some were even hacked to death with sharpened hoes. Most managed to get through the next gate and into the old city, and there we hunted them down.
It was a wild and howling hunt. Sigefrid’s troops, those who had not sallied beyond the walls, were slow to learn of their defeat. They stayed on their ramparts until they saw death coming, and then they fled into streets and alleys already choked with men, women and children fleeing the Saxon assault. They ran down the terraced hills of the city, going for the boats that were tied to the wharves downstream of the bridge. Some, the fools, tried to save their belongings, and that was fatal for they were burdened by their possessions, caught in the streets and cut down. A young girl screamed as she was dragged into a house by a Mercian spearman. Dead men lay in gutters, sniffed by dogs. Some houses showed a cross, denoting that Christians lived there, but the protection meant nothing if a girl in the house was pretty. A priest held a wooden crucifix aloft outside a low doorway, and shouted that there were Christian women sheltering in his small church, but the priest was cut down by an axe and the screaming began. A score of Northmen were caught in the palace where they guarded the treasury amassed by Sigefrid and Erik and they all died there, their blood trickling between the small tiles of the mosaic floor of the Roman hall.
It was the fyrd that did most destruction. The household troops had discipline and stayed together, and it was those trained troops who chased the Northmen out of Lundene. I stayed on the street next to the river wall, the street that we had followed from our half-swamped ships, and we drove the fugitives as though they were sheep running from wolves. Father Pyrlig had attached his cross banner to a Danish spear and he waved it over our heads to show Æthelred’s men that we were friends. Screams and howling sounded from the higher streets. I stepped over a dead child, her golden curls thick with the blood of her father who had died beside her. His last act had been to seize his child’s arm and his dead hand was still curled about her elbow. I thought of my daughter, Stiorra. ‘Lord!’ Sihtric shouted, ‘lord!’ he was pointing with his sword.
He had seen that one large group of Northmen, presumably cut off as they retreated towards their ships, had taken refuge on the broken bridge. The bridge’s northern end was guarded by a Roman bastion through which an arch led, though the arch had long lost its gateway. Instead the passage to the bridge’s broken timber roadway was blocked by a shield wall. They were in the same position I had been in Ludd’s Gate with their flanks protected by high stonework. Their shields filled the arch, and I could see at least six ranks of men behind the front line of round overlapping shields.
Steapa made a low growling noise and hefted his axe. ‘No,’ I said, laying a hand on his massive shield arm.
‘Make a boar’s tusk,’ he said vengefully, ‘kill the bastards. Kill them all.’
‘No,’ I said again. A boar’s tusk was a wedge of men that would drive into a shield wall like a human spear-point, but no boar’s tusk would pierce this Northmen’s wall. They were too tightly packed in the archway, and they were desperate, and desperate men will fight fanatically for the chance to live. They would die in the end, that was true, but many of my men would die with them.
‘Stay here,’ I told my men. I handed my borrowed shield to Sihtric, then gave him my helmet. I sheathed Serpent-Breath. Pyrlig copied me, taking off his helmet. ‘You don’t have to come,’ I told him.
‘And why shouldn’t I?’ he asked, smiling. He handed his makeshift standard to Rypere, laid his shield down, and, because I was glad of the Welshman’s company, the two of us walked to the bridge’s gate.
‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I announced to the hard-faced men staring over their shield rims, ‘and if you wish to feast in Odin’s corpse-hall this night then I am willing to send you there.’
Behind me the city screamed and smoke drifted dense across the sky. The nine men in the enemy’s front rank stared at me, but none spoke.
‘But if you want to taste the joys of this world longer,’ I went on, ‘then speak to me.’
‘We serve our earl,’ one of the men finally said.
‘And he is?’
‘Sigefrid Thurgilson,’ the man said.
‘Who fought well,’ I said. I had been screaming insults at Sigefrid not two hours before, but now was the time for softer speech. A time to arrange for an enemy to yield and thus save my men’s lives. ‘Does the Earl Sigefrid live?’ I asked.
‘He lives,’ the man said curtly, jerking his head to indicate that Sigefrid was somewhere behind him on the bridge.
‘Then tell him Uhtred of Bebbanburg would speak with him, to decide whether he lives or dies.’
That was not my choice to make. The Fates had already made the decision, and I was but their instrument. The man who had spoken to me called the message to the men behind on the bridge and I waited. Pyrlig was praying, though whether he beseeched mercy for the folk who screamed behind us or death for the men in front of us, I never asked.
Then the tight-packed shield wall in the arch shuffled aside as men made a passage down the roadway’s centre. ‘The Earl Erik will speak with you,’ the man told me.
And