Whipping up his axe, he lurched forward with a snarl. Gaps were appearing in the shield wall. Through one, he glimpsed a man who could only be Harald, taller than most of the Northmen who surrounded him, his blond beard glowing in the harsh sun. The red and white banner fluttered above his head.
Raising his fist in the air, Redwald ordered his huscarls towards the enemy king. As the warriors thundered nearer, the Northmen along the front of the shield wall raised their spears. All Viking eyes focused on the attack. Redwald beckoned to one of the archers loosing his shafts from the cover of a broad oak and pointed at Harald. The archer nodded and notched his arrow. Drawing the greased fibre string of his hunting bow, he took aim and fired. The arrow whistled through the gap in the shield wall. Distracted by the huscarls, the king of the Northmen did not raise his red and white shield, and the shaft plunged deep into his throat.
Redwald thought his own heart would burst. The Viking leader went down in a spray of blood, clutching at his wound. Instantly, Redwald could see the dread burn through the ranks of all the Northmen standing near him. Encouraged by the sight, the English crashed once more against the crumbling shield wall, splintering the wood with their axes and driving the enemy back step by step.
Wiping the sweat from his eyes, Redwald felt his jubilation ebb away when he saw another man take the enemy king’s place. But this was no Northman. Shorter than Harald, but with an English helmet and mail, Redwald guessed it could only be Tostig Godwinson. The outlaw barked orders in English, and whether the Vikings understood or not they marshalled their forces to the frantic waving of his hand. The gaps in the shield wall closed as the men began a steady retreat to the bridge.
Redwald realized that Tostig intended to regroup on the other bank. For an instant, the two leaders locked eyes before the outlaw took up his axe and waded to the wall. Gritting his teeth, he hacked with a fury that dwarfed even that of the seasoned Viking warriors. Bodies piled high in front of him. Of all there, only Redwald truly understood him. The young man alone saw the potent resentment, the pain of betrayal, the bitter grief that came only between kin.
Redwald felt a cold calm descend on him. ‘Let my hand be true,’ he whispered to himself.
Stalking forward, he drew his sword and threw himself into the seething mass of English warriors. Voices roared all around him. Buffeted side to side as if by a winter sea, he elbowed his way through the men until he came within sight of Tostig. The outlaw dripped with blood and brain-matter, his teeth clenched in a constant, bestial snarl. His axe fell, again and again. Helmets split and mail shredded. Waiting for his moment, Redwald kept his head down and hoped he would not be recognized.
One English warrior fell, his jaw torn free by Tostig’s axe. Into the gap, a ceorl stumbled with his spear. He was younger than Redwald, plain-featured and simple, with hair like straw. His face looked drained of blood, and his weapon wavered in his untutored hand. Probably never used a spear in battle before, Redwald thought.
When Tostig raised his axe, the ceorl retreated a step to avoid the blow. Redwald lunged into the man’s back, propelling him forward. The axe crunched into the spearman’s skull, killing him instantly, but, wrong-footed by his victim’s forward motion, the king’s brother struggled to withdraw his weapon. Redwald saw his opening. Avoiding the mail that could deflect or break his blade, he drove his sword upwards with both hands, under Tostig’s chin and into his brain. He slid his weapon out of the wound just as quickly and instantly pressed back through the ranks of men before anyone recognized him. Bursting out of the English warriors, he ran to reclaim his mount.
Back on his horse, he saw that Tostig’s death had broken the enemy’s resistance. On the far river bank, the leaderless Vikings massed for a final stand. The reinforcements left at the fleet were finally making their way to the rear, bolstering the ranks. Red-faced and sweating, they had clearly raced all the way from Riccall in the heat. Several collapsed with exhaustion; others threw off their mail.
When all the Northmen had fled to the eastern bank, a lone Viking took a stand on the bridge to prevent the English from swarming across. Clean-shaven, with long brown hair tumbling from under his helmet, he stood as tall as Redwald with a boy upon his shoulders. English warrior after English warrior tried to take him down, but the Northman swung his axe with blows that could have felled a tree. The bodies fell into the now-red river or heaped at his feet so that it was even harder for the English to reach him.
Removing his helmet, Redwald mopped the sweat from his brow. He heard a blast from a horn on the other side of the river and within moments the king’s huscarls tore into the waiting army from the south. The king, as cunning as a snake, must have redirected some of the English army to cross the Derwent at an older bridge a mile further south. For all its ferocity, the battle on the western bank had only been the mildest precursor to what was to come.
A galloping horse distracted Redwald from the furious clash on the far bank. It was Harold, slaked in blood. Where his men massed at the bridge, he leapt from his horse and barged through the ranks, yelling, ‘Stand aside for the king.’ The warriors parted in an instant. At the front, Harold watched the big Viking hack down two more men, his frustration rising. Snatching a javelin from the chest of a dead Northman, he snarled a curse and hurled the weapon with a force that seemed impossible in one who had spent all morning in combat. The javelin flew true. It rammed into the surprised Viking’s chest, ripping through his mail and bursting out of his back in a shower of blood. The man teetered for a moment, clutching at the wooden haft protruding from his front, and then he toppled over the bridge to splash into the river. Harold spat and returned to his horse. Cheering, his men flooded across the bridge to join the bloody battle on the other bank.
By late afternoon, Redwald was sitting in the suffocating heat at the foot of an elm. He looked across a field of bodies seething with black-winged carrion crows to the sunlit high ground rising up in the east. Too weary to stand and sleeked in sweat, he was aware that his arms were burning from the thousands of blows he must have struck that day. His helmet and mail lay beside him, tarnished and dented now.
Blood trickled in thick streams down the bank into the slow-moving Derwent, which had long since turned the colour of rusted mail. The feeding birds cawed hungrily, and behind the din he could hear the cries of the wounded and the dying. The English army had suffered terrible losses. Even leaderless, the Northmen had fought like devils, the reinforcements instilling renewed purpose in their weary fellow warriors. But in the end, the English numbers had proved decisive. When the rout was assured, Harold had ordered the West Saxon mounted troops to hunt out all the enemy survivors. Redwald had watched the Vikings cut down as they fled, or drowned in the river. Some had been trapped in barns and bothies and burned alive. He had just heard from a messenger returning from Riccall: of the three hundred dragon-ships that mounted the invasion, only twenty had escaped. It was the greatest defeat inflicted on the Northmen in their long, brutal history.
‘You fought well.’
His eyelids drooping, Redwald started at the familiar deep voice. The king strode over with the energy of a man half his age. Gathering all his strength, the young man pulled himself up the tree’s rough trunk and rested his back against the bark. ‘I wished to serve in a manner that would make you proud,’ he replied with an overstated flourish of his right arm. He put on a cocky grin.
‘And you did.’ The king removed his helmet and held it in the crook of his arm. ‘This was a great victory. All Englishmen should be proud.’ A shadow crossed his face as he glanced back to the western bank. ‘Tostig is dead.’
‘I saw your brother brought down in battle,’ Redwald said, the lie springing easily to his lips. ‘Who slew him I do not know, but I failed to prevent the killing blow.’
The king shook his head. ‘It was always a vain hope that Tostig would survive. He was a Godwin. He would fight until his last breath.’
‘Still, though we never met, I grieve for him, for he is your kin.’
Harold turned away to look across the field of the dead. ‘Our victory was hard-won. We have lost many men this day.’
‘But the throne is safe.’
‘For now, though I fear…’ He killed the words in his throat and pointed towards the Archbishop of Eoferwic picking his way through the corpses, his white tunic aglow. Five black-garbed monks accompanied him. ‘Ealdred looks for his pickings. The Northmen left behind a block of gold among their treasures as big as this.’ He put his hands a sword’s length apart. ‘Harald looted it from Greece on one of his raids. It was his talisman, but it failed him this day. That should buy my way to heaven.’ He grinned, his teeth smeared with blood. ‘I need no great churches to earn my final reward.’
‘And now?’
‘Now we begin the negotiations for surrender with Harald’s son Olaf. We will bury our dead, like good Englishmen, but we will leave the Vikings unburied. Their bones will be a warning to all who dare covet English
