'I don't trust you, Moor.'
'I don't trust you either. So we're even.'
Cynewulf eyed him. 'Come, then.'
Retracing his tracks from the day when he had gone spying with Arngrim, he made for the high ground from which they had watched the Danish camp.
From here Cynewulf could see the battle laid out as if on a diagram. There was the King's party – he thought he recognised Alfred himself, his jewelled crown a pinprick of colour, his dragon banner fluttering. Around him his reserve troops milled, most of them fyrd, a muddy, homogenous mass. On the other side of the killing field was a mirror-image party that must be Guthrum and his own companions.
And between these two poles of command was the battle front. All Cynewulf could make out was a compressed mass of hundreds of men, pressed together beneath glittering swords and axes. At the centre of the mob was a kind of bloody froth, a line of bright crimson, where the swords stabbed and the axes swung. Cynewulf was astonished by the brightness of the blood, the quantity of it, and the almost neat way limbs were severed and torsos sliced through.
Pagans were much drawn to boundary places, river banks and ocean surfaces, places where one world touched another. That clash of shield walls was just such a boundary place, a boundary between death and life, where breathing men were stabbed and hewn to lifeless pulp.
Ibn Zuhr was analytical, dismissive. 'Only a few hundred men on each side. This would have been no more than an incident in the great battles of the past. The Caesars brought armies of tens of thousands to this island. And there is no tactic but to press and thrust. A thousand years ago Alexander the Great used cavalry to-'
Cynewulf didn't know what cavalry was, and didn't care. 'Shut up,' he snarled.
The Moor seemed startled by the priest's anger. But he said, 'We have seen all we can see. We should go.'
Cynewulf couldn't bear to look at the man. But he nodded, and the two of them withdrew.
XVII
Fighting down the slope of the ridge rather than up it was a slight advantage that became greater as the day wore on, as men fell, and those who survived became exhausted and weakened by blows and injuries. And so the English were steadily pressing the Danes back down the hill, back towards their camp, the skjaldborg intact but retreating step by step.
But the shield wall was a mill that ground up men. As warriors fell, each side poured in more and more bodies, living men to be processed to corpses. The English did outnumber the Danes, but once the cream of the English army was used up there would be only the low-quality levies left. If the skjaldborg did not break soon, Arngrim saw, the English would lose the battle simply by bleeding to death.
How was it to be broken? Even as he cut and stabbed and thrust, even as he felt his own strength drain with the blood he must be losing, Arngrim tried to think, just as the King had urged him to. If they couldn't batter their way through the Danes, what was to be done?
Then Egil reared up before him once more. The Beast of Cippanhamm had lost his helmet, and some lucky English blow had smashed his teeth, turning his mouth into a bloody pit lined with jagged stumps. But his eyes were wild. He was laughing.
And he recognised Arngrim.
In that instant Amgrim thought of Cynewulf and his prophecy. If not for the Menologium this battle might not be taking place at all, for Alfred might not have found the determination to wage it – and if not for the Menologium the Beast would not have the faith in his own invulnerability which must have carried him through battle after battle, to this field. They were here, Amgrim thought, both of them, positioned like counters on a game board, because of the Weaver, the sage of the furthest future. And yet they could die here.
Egil threw himself forward.
Their shields slammed. Arngrim was thrust back half a pace. Egil stepped back to drive again, but before the Dane could close Arngrim raised his shield and slammed its boss into Egil's face. Egil staggered, his nose a bloody ruin, and Arngrim had room to draw Ironsides from its scabbard on his back. But Egil came on again, spattering Arngrim with blood and spit and snot, and their shields clashed once more. It was almost with relief that Arngrim realised that he could give himself up to this elemental fight, let himself fall into the pit of darkness inside him.
But he must think. To break the Danish shield wall was more important than to sate himself in a private war with this animal of a man – and in a flash he saw how he could do it.
With a roar and a vast exertion he shoved Egil back once more. And the next time Egil came at him, rather than facing Egil's charge, he flung himself backwards. He clattered into the fyrdmen behind him and finished up on his back.
Egil, off balance and caught by surprise, ran a couple of steps forward and tumbled over. His huge strength had been holding this section of the Danes' wall together, and without his support the Danes around him slipped and fell. A length of the skjaldborg collapsed, battered Danish shields knocking against each other.
And the English, roaring, rushed into the gap like flies into a wound.
Arngrim's ploy had worked. Now all he needed was a grain of luck for himself, a splinter of time.
But his luck ran out. Egil was already on his feet, and standing over him. The blade of his axe flashed.
Arngrim had no time to raise his shield, no time to roll away. The iron cut through his mail shirt, between his belly and his groin, and buried itself deep in his gut. Pain slammed, and the world greyed.
Egil stood over him, still laughing from that ruin of a mouth. And he dragged at his axe. Arngrim could feel the blade slice through soft organs. And then it caught on something, perhaps his pelvis. More pain burst inside him.
But he still held Ironsides. Screaming, he swung his sword.
The heavy, faithful blade cut through Egil's right arm just below the shoulder, in a stroke as neat as a butcher's. Egil howled. His arm hanging by threads of gristle, he lost his grip on his axe. And Amgrim grabbed Egil's hand. As Egil stumbled back Arngrim twisted the hand with the last of his strength, so that the final bits of gristle snapped, and the severed arm fell across his belly.
The world swam away.
XVIII
With victory secured, Alfred's priests launched themselves into a long sequence of services of thanksgiving. Alfred endured this for an hour.
Then he broke up the services and put the priests to work. In their vestments they were sent down to the battlefield, where they were to tend the English wounded. His clerks too were sent to the field, to work their way across broken soil soaked in blood, to retrieve the weapons of the dead, swords and spears and shields. Even arrow-heads were to be retrieved for their precious iron, Alfred ordered, plucked from the bodies of the dead if necessary.
Alfred knew the fight was not yet done, and even in the aftermath of this great triumph he was thinking ahead. The surviving Danes were retreating to their old quarters at Cippanhamm. There they would have to be starved out by a siege – and for that the English would need all the weapons they could muster.
Cynewulf waited in the camp until Arngrim was brought in.
Two thegns bore the body, laid out on two shields set on spears. Arngrim's face was battered to bloody meat, his mail shirt punctured in a dozen places, and even the shields on which he was carried were splintered and broken. With him on his improvised bier was his sword Ironsides, undamaged but bloodstained – and the severed arm of the beast Egil.
Alfred had the arm of the Beast nailed to the great oak tree at the heart of the camp, above his giving- throne, where all men could see it. Alfred announced that the English had won the day because of the advantage of
