“Earl Sidroc the Younger. He’s always sniffing. My son is there?”
“Yes,” I said, “next to a very fat man who keeps whispering to him and grinning.”
“Harald!” Ravn said. “I wondered if he would turn up. He’s another king.”
“Really?” Brida asked.
“Well, he calls himself king, and he certainly rules over a few muddy fields and a herd of smelly pigs.”
All those men had come from Denmark, and there were others besides. Earl Fraena had brought men from Ireland, and Earl Osbern who had provided the garrison for Lundene while the army gathered, and together these kings and earls had assembled well over two thousand men. Osbern and Sidroc proposed crossing the river and striking directly south. This, they argued, would cut Wessex in two and the eastern part, which used to be the kingdom of Kent, could then be taken quickly.
“There has to be much treasure in Contwaraburg,” Sidroc insisted. “It’s the central shrine of their religion.”
“And while we march on their shrine,” Ragnar said, “they will come up behind us. Their power is not in the east, but in the west. Defeat the west and all Wessex falls. We can take Contwaraburg once we’ve beaten the west.”
This was the argument. Either take the easy part of Wessex or else attack their major strongholds that lay to the west, and two merchants were asked to speak. Both men were Danes who had been trading in Readingum only two weeks before. Readingum lay a few miles upriver and was on the edge of Wessex, and they claimed to have heard that King ?thelred and his brother, Alfred, were gathering the shire forces from the west and the two merchants reckoned the enemy army would number at least three thousand.
“Of whom only three hundred will be proper fighting men,” Halfdan interjected sarcastically, and was rewarded by the sound of men banging swords or spears against their shields. It was while this noise echoed under the church’s barrel roof that a new group of warriors entered, led by a very tall and very burly man in a black tunic. He looked formidable, clean shaven, angry, and very rich for his black cloak had an enormous brooch of amber mounted in gold, his arms were heavy with golden rings, and he wore a golden hammer on a thick golden chain about his neck. The warriors made way for him, his arrival causing silence among the crowd nearest to him, and the silence spread as he walked up the church until the mood, which had been of celebration, suddenly seemed wary.
“Who is it?” Ravn whispered to me.
“Very tall,” I said, “many arm rings.”
“Gloomy,” Brida put in, “dressed in black.”
“Ah! The earl Guthrum,” Ravn said.
“Guthrum?”
“Guthrum the Unlucky,” Ravn said.
“With all those arm rings?”
“You could give Guthrum the world,” Ravn said, “and he would still believe you had cheated him.”
“He has a bone hanging in his hair,” Brida said.
“You must ask him about that,” Ravn said, evidently amused, but he would say no more about the bone, which was a human rib and tipped with gold.
I learned Guthrum the Unlucky was an earl from Denmark who had been wintering at Beamfleot, a place that lay a good distance east of Lundene on the northern side of the Temes estuary, and once he had greeted the men bunched about the altar, he announced that he had brought fourteen ships upriver. No one applauded. Guthrum, who had the saddest, sourest face I had ever seen, stared at the assembly like a man standing trial and expecting a dire verdict. “We had decided,” Ragnar broke the uncomfortable silence, “to go west.” No such decision had been made, but nor did anyone contradict Ragnar. “Those ships that are already through the bridge,” Ragnar went on, “will take their crews upstream and the rest of the army will march on foot or horseback.”
“My ships must go upstream,” Guthrum said.
“They are through the bridge?”
“They will still go upstream,” Guthrum insisted, thus letting us know that his fleet was below the bridge.
“It would be better,” Ragnar said, “if we went tomorrow.” In the last few days the whole of the Great Army had assembled in Lundene, marching in from the settlements east and north where some had been quartered, and the longer we waited, the more of the precious food supply would be consumed.
“My ships go upstream,” Guthrum said flatly.
“He’s worried,” Ravn whispered to me, “that he can’t carry away the plunder on horseback. He wants his ships so he can fill them with treasure.”
“Why let him come?” I asked. It was plain no one liked Earl Guthrum, and his arrival seemed as unwelcome as it was inconvenient, but Ravn just shrugged the question off. Guthrum, it seemed, was here, and if he was here he must take part. That still seems incomprehensible to me, just as I still did not understand why Ivar and Ubba were not joining the attack on Wessex. It was true that both men were rich and scarcely needed more riches, but for years they had talked of conquering the West Saxons and now both had simply turned away. Guthrum did not need land or wealth either, but he thought he did, so he came. That was the Danish way. Men served in a campaign if they wished, or else they stayed home, and there was no single authority among the Danes. Halfdan was the Great Army’s ostensible leader, but he did not frighten men as his two older brothers did and so he could do nothing without the agreement of the other chieftains. An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.
It took two days to get Guthrum’s ships past the bridge. They were beautiful things, those ships, larger than most Danish boats, and each decorated at prow and stern with blackpainted serpent heads. His men, and there were many of them, all wore black. Even their shields were painted black, and while I thought Guthrum to be one of the most miserable men I had ever seen, I had to confess his troops were impressive. We might have lost two days, but we had gained the black warriors. And what was there to fear? The Great Army had gathered, it was midwinter when no one fought so the enemy should not be expecting us, and that enemy was led by a king and a prince more interested in prayer than in fighting. All Wessex lay before us and common report said that Wessex was as rich a country as any in all the world, rivaling Frankia for its treasures, and inhabited by monks and nuns whose houses were stuffed with gold, spilling over with silver, and ripe for slaughter. We would all be rich. So we went to war.
Ships on the winter Temes. Ships sliding past brittle reeds and leafless willows and bare alders. Wet oar blades shining in the pale sunlight. The prows of our ships bore their beasts to quell the spirits of the land we invaded, and it was good land with rich fields, though all were deserted. There was almost a celebratory air to that brief voyage, a celebration unspoiled by the presence of Guthrum’s dark ships. Men oarwalked, the same feat I had watched Ragnar perform on that faroff day when his three ships had appeared off Bebbanburg. I tried it myself and raised a huge cheer when I fell in. It looked easy to run along the oar bank, leaping from shaft to shaft, but a rower only had to twitch an oar to cause a man to slip and the river water was bitterly cold so that Ragnar made me strip off my wet clothes and wear his bearskin cloak until I was warm. Men sang, the ships forged against the current, the far hills to the north and south slowly closed on the river’s banks and, as evening came, we saw the first horsemen on the southern skyline. Watching us.
We reached Readingum at dusk. Each of Ragnar’s three ships was loaded with spades, many of them forged by Ealdwulf, and our first task was to start making a wall. As more ships came, more men helped, and by nightfall our camp was protected by a long, straggling earth wall that would have been hardly any obstacle to an attacking force for it was merely a low mound that was easy to cross, but no one did come and assault us, and no Wessex army appeared the next morning and so we were free to make the wall higher and more formidable.
Readingum was built where the river Kenet flows into the Temes, and so our wall was built between the two rivers. It enclosed the small town that had been abandoned by its inhabitants and provided shelter for most of the ships’ crews. The land army was still out of sight for they had marched along the north bank of the Temes, in Mercian territory, and were seeking a ford, which they found further upstream, so that our wall was virtually finished by the time they marched in. At first we thought it was the West Saxon army coming, but it was Halfdan’s men, marching out of enemy territory they had found deserted. The wall was high now and, because there were deep woods to the south, we had cut trees to make a palisade along its whole length that was about eight hundred paces. In front of the wall we dug a ditch that flooded when we broke through the two rivers’ banks, and across the ditch we were making four bridges guarded by wooden forts. This was our base. From here we could march deep
