forces, and that was the mistake the Danes had made at ?sc’s Hill, and so I hesitated, but Odda had not come to me because he suddenly liked me, but because I had been defiant with Ubba. I alone on Cynuit was confident of victory, or seemed to be, and that, despite my age, made me the leader on this hill. Ealdorman Odda, old enough to be my father, wanted my support. He wanted me to tell him what to do, me who had never been in a great shield wall, but I was young and I was arrogant and the auguries had told me what must be done, and so I told Odda.
“Have you ever seen the sceadugengan?” I asked him.
His response was to make the sign of the cross.
“When I was a child,” I said, “I dreamed of the sceadugengan. I went out at night to find them and I learned the ways of the night so I could join them.”
“What has that to do with the dawn?” he asked.
“Give me fifty men,” I said, “and they will join my men and at dawn they will attack there.” I pointed toward the ships. “We’ll start by burning their ships.”
Odda looked down the hill at the nearer fires, which marked where the enemy sentries were posted in the meadow to our east. “They’ll know you’re coming,” he said, “and be ready for you.” He meant that a hundred men could not cross Cynuit’s skyline, go downhill, break through the sentries, and cross the marsh in silence. He was right. Before we had gone ten paces the sentries would have seen us and the alarm would be sounded and Ubba’s army, which was surely as ready for battle as our own, would stream from its southern encampment to confront my men in the meadow before they reached the marsh.
“But when the Danes see their ships burning,” I said, “they will go to the river’s bank, not to the meadow. And the riverbank is hemmed by marsh. They can’t outflank us there.” They could, of course, but the marsh would give them uncertain footing so it would not be so dangerous as being outflanked in the meadow.
“But you will never reach the riverbank,” he said, disappointed in my idea.
“A shadowwalker can reach it,” I said.
He looked at me and said nothing.
“I can reach it,” I said, “and when the first ship burns every Dane will run to the bank, and that’s when the hundred men make their charge. The Danes will be running to save their ships, and that will give the hundred men time to cross the marsh. They go as fast as they can, they join me, we burn more ships, and the Danes will be trying to kill us.” I pointed to the riverbank, showing where the Danes would go from their camp along the strip of firm ground to where the ships were beached. “And when the Danes are all on that bank,” I went on, “between the river and the marsh, you lead the fyrd to take them in the rear.”
He brooded, watching the ships. If we attacked at all then the obvious place was down the southern slope, straight into the heart of Ubba’s forces, and that would be a battle of shield wall against shield wall, our nine hundred men against his twelve hundred, and at the beginning we would have the advantage for many of Ubba’s men were posted around the hill and it would take time for those men to hurry back and join the Danish ranks, and in that time we would drive deep into their camp, but their numbers would grow and we might well be stopped, outflanked, and then would come the hard slaughter. And in that hard slaughter they would have the advantage of numbers and they would wrap around our ranks and our rearmost men, those with sickles instead of weapons, would begin to die. But if I went down the hill and began to burn the boats, then the Danes would race down the riverbank to stop me, and that would put them on the narrow strip of riverside land, and if the hundred men under Leofric joined me, then we might hold them long enough for Odda to reach their rear and then it would be the Danes who would die, trapped between Odda, my men, the marsh, and the river. They would be trapped like the Northumbrian army had been trapped at Eoferwic. But at ?sc’s Hill disaster had come to the side that first split its forces.
“It could work,” Odda said tentatively.
“Give me fifty men,” I urged him, “young ones.”
“Young?”
“They have to run down the hill,” I said. “They have to go fast. They have to reach the ships before the Danes, and they must do it in the dawn.” I spoke with a confidence I did not feel and I paused for his agreement, but he said nothing. “Win this, lord,” I said, and I did not call him “lord” because he outranked me, but because he was older than me, “then you will have saved Wessex. Alfred will reward you.”
He thought for a while and maybe it was the thought of a reward that persuaded him, for he nodded. “I will give you fifty men,” he said.
Ravn had given me much advice and all of it was good, but now, in the night wind, I remembered just one thing he had said to me on the night we first met, something I had never forgotten. Never, he had said, never fight Ubba.
The fifty men were led by the shire reeve, Edor, a man who looked as hard as Leofric and, like Leofric, had fought in the big shield walls. He carried a cutoff boar spear as his favorite weapon, though a sword was strapped to his side. The spear, he said, had the weight and strength to punch through mail and could even break through a shield.
Edor, like Leofric, had simply accepted my idea. It never occurred to me that they might not accept it, yet looking back I am astonished that the battle of Cynuit was fought according to the idea of a twentyyearold who had never stood in a slaughter wall. Yet I was tall, I was a lord, I had grown up among warriors, and I had the arrogant confidence of a man born to battle. I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, son of another Uhtred, and we had not held Bebbanburg and its lands by whimpering at altars. We are warriors.
Edor’s men and mine assembled behind Cynuit’s eastern rampart where they would wait until the first ship burned in the dawn. Leofric was on the right with theHeahengel ’s crew, and I wanted him there because that was where the blow would fall when Ubba led his men to attack us at the river’s edge. Edor and the men of Defnascir were on the left and their chief job, apart from killing whomever they first met on the riverbank, was to snatch up flaming timbers from the Danish fires and hurl them into more ships.
“We’re not trying to burn all the ships,” I said. “Just get four or five ablaze. That’ll bring the Danes like a swarm of bees.”
“Stinging bees,” a voice said from the dark.
“You’re frightened?” I asked scornfully. “They’re frightened! Their auguries are bad, they think they’re going to lose, and the last thing they want is to face men of Defnascir in a gray dawn. We’ll make them scream like women, we’ll kill them, and we’ll send them to their Danish hell.” That was the extent of my battle speech. I should have talked more, but I was nervous because I had to go down the hill first, first and alone. I had to live my childhood dream of shadowwalking, and Leofric and Edor would not lead the hundred men down to the river until they saw the Danes go to rescue their ships, and if I could not touch fire to the ships then there would be no attack and Odda’s fears would come back and the Danes would win and Wessex would die and there would be no more England. “So rest now,” I finished lamely.
“It will be three or four hours till dawn.”
I went back to the rampart and Father Willibald joined me there, holding out his crucifix that had been carved from an ox’s thigh bone. “You want God’s blessing?” he asked me.
“What I want, father,” I said, “is your cloak.” He had a fine woolen cloak, hooded and dyed a dark brown. He gave it me and I tied the cords around my neck, hiding the sheen of my mail coat. “And in the dawn, father,” I said, “I want you to stay up here. The riverbank will be no place for priests.”
“If men die there,” he said, “then it is my place.”
“You want to go to heaven in the morning?”
“No.”
“Then stay here.” I spoke more savagely than I intended, but that was nervousness, and then it was time to go for, though the night was still dark and the dawn a long way off, I needed time to slink through the Danish lines. Leofric saw me off, walking with me to the northern flank of Cynuit, which was in mooncast shadow. It was also the least guarded side of the hill, for the northern slope led to nothing except marshes and the S?fern sea. I gave Leofric my shield. “I don’t need it,” I said. “It will just make me clumsy.”
He touched my arm. “You’re a cocky bastard, earsling, aren’t you?”
“Is that a fault?”
“No, lord,” he said, and that last word was high praise. “God go with you,” he added, “whichever god it is.”
