Sword Song

stopped abruptly. He was a taciturn man and found it difficult to speak more than a few words together.

“Beached?” I asked.

“They were anchored,” he said.

That suggested the Danes had wanted their vessels to be ready at any state of the tide, but it also meant the ships could not be defended because their crews had been mostly ashore where they were throwing up earth walls to make a camp. ?thelred’s fleet had made short work of the few men aboard the enemy vessels, and then the great rope-wrapped stones that served as anchors had been hauled up and the sixteen ships were towed to the northern bank and beached there. “He was going to keep them there,” Steapa explained, “till he was finished, then bring them back.”

“Finished?” I asked.

“He wanted to kill all the pagans before we left,” Steapa said, and explained how ?thelred’s fleet had marauded up the Sture and its adjacent river, the Arwan, landing men along the banks to burn Danish halls, slaughter Danish cattle and, when they could, to kill Danes. The Saxon raiders had caused panic. Folk had fled inland, but Gunnkel, left shipless in his encampment at the mouth of the Sture, had not panicked.

“You didn’t attack the camp?” I asked Steapa.

“Lord ?thelred said it was too well protected.”

“I thought you said it was unfinished?”

Steapa shrugged. “They hadn’t built the palisade,” he said, “at least on one side, so we could have got in and killed them, but we’d have lost a lot of our own men too.”

“True,” I admitted.

“So we attacked farms instead,” Steapa went on, and while ?thelred’s men raided the Danish settlements, Gunnkel had sent messengers southward to the other rivers of the East Anglian coast. There, on those riverbanks, were other Viking encampments. Gunnkel was summoning reinforcements.

“I told Lord ?thelred to leave,” Steapa said gloomily, “I told him on the second day. I said we’d stayed long enough.”

“He wouldn’t listen to you?”

“He called me a fool,” Steapa said with a shrug. ?thelred had wanted plunder, and so he had stayed in the Sture and his men brought him anything they could find of value, from cooking pots to reaping knives. “He found some silver,” Steapa said, “but not much.”

And while ?thelred stayed to enrich himself, the sea-wolves gathered.

Danish ships came from the south. Sigefrid’s ships had sailed from Beamfleot, joining other boats that rowed from the mouths of the Colaun, the Hwealf, and the Pant. I had passed those rivers often enough and imagined the lean fast boats sliding out through the mudbanks on the ebbing tides, with their high prows fiercely decorated with beasts and their hulls filled with vengeful men, shields, and weapons.

The Danish ships gathered off the island of Horseg, south of the Sture in the wide bay that is haunted by wildfowl. Then, on a gray morning, under a summer rainstorm that blew in from the sea, and on a flooding tide made stronger by a full moon, thirty-eight ships came from the ocean to enter the Sture.

“It was a Sunday,” Steapa said, “and the Lord ?thelred insisted we listen to a sermon.”

“Alfred will be pleased to hear that,” I said sarcastically.

“It was on the beach,” Steapa said, “where the Danish boats were grounded.”

“Why there?”

“Because the priests wanted to drive the evil spirits from the boats,” he said, and told me how the beast- heads from the captured ships had been stacked in a great pile on the sand. Driftwood had been packed around them, along with straw from a nearby thatch, and then, to loud prayers from the priests, the heap had been set alight. Dragons and eagles, ravens and wolves had burned, their flames leaping high, and the smoke of the great fire must have blown inland as the rain spat and hissed on the burning wood. The priests had prayed and chanted, crowing their victory over the pagans, and no one had noticed the dark shapes coming through the seaward drizzle.

I can only imagine the fear, the flight, and the slaughter. Danes leaping ashore. Sword-Danes, spear-Danes, ax-Danes. The only reason so many men had escaped was that so many were dying. The Danes had started their killing, and found so many men to kill that they could not reach those who fled to the ships. Other Danish boats were attacking the Saxon fleet, but Rodbora had held them off. “I’d left men aboard,” Steapa said.

“Why?”

“Don’t know,” he said bleakly. “I just had a feeling.”

“I know that feeling,” I said. It was the prickle at the back of the neck, the vague unformed suspicion that danger was close, and it was a feeling that should never be ignored. I have seen my hounds suddenly raise their heads from sleep and growl softly, or whine piteously with their eyes staring at me in mute appeal. I know when that happens that thunder is coming, and it always does, but how the dogs sense it I cannot tell. But it must be the same feeling, the discomfort of hidden danger.

“It was a rare fight,” Steapa said dully.

We were rounding the last bend in the Temes before the river reached Lundene. I could see the city’s repaired wall, the new timber raw against the older Roman stone. Banners were hung from those ramparts, most of the flags showing saints or crosses; bright symbols to defy the enemy who came every day to inspect the city from the east. An enemy, I thought, who had just won a victory that would stun Alfred.

Steapa was sparing with details of the fight and I had to prise what little I learned out of him. The enemy boats, he said, had mostly landed on the eastern end of the beach, drawn there by the great fire, and Rodbora and seven other Saxon boats had been farther west. The beach was a place of screaming chaos as pagans howled and killed. The Saxons tried to reach the western ships and Steapa had made a shield wall to protect those boats as the fugitives scrambled aboard.

“?thelred reached you,” I commented sourly.

“He can run fast,” Steapa said.

“And ?thelflaed?”

“We couldn’t go back for her,” he said.

“No, I’m sure,” I said, and knew he spoke the truth. He told me how ?thelflaed had been trapped and surrounded by the enemy. She had been with her maids close to the great fire, while ?thelred had been accompanying the priests who sprinkled holy water on the prows of the captured Danish ships.

“He did want to go back for her,” Steapa admitted.

“So he should,” I said.

“But it couldn’t be done,” he said, “so we rowed away.”

“They didn’t try and stop you?”

“They tried,” he said.

“And?” I prompted him.

“Some got on board,” he said, and shrugged. I imagined Steapa, ax in hand, cutting down the boarders. “We managed to row past them,” he said, as if it had been easy. The Danes, I thought, should have stopped every boat escaping, but the six ships had managed to escape to sea. “But eight boats left altogether,” Steapa added.

So two Saxon boats had been successfully boarded, and I flinched at the thought of the ax-work and sword strokes, of the bottom timbers sloppy with blood. “Did you see Sigefrid?” I asked.

Steapa nodded. “He was in a chair. Strapped in.”

“And do you know if ?thelflaed lives?” I asked.

“She lives,” Steapa said. “As we left, we saw her. She was on that ship that was in Lundene? The ship you let go?”

“The Wave-Tamer,” I said.

“Sigefrid’s ship,” Steapa said, “and he showed her to us. He made her stand on the steering platform.”

“Clothed?”

“Clothed?” he asked, frowning as though my question was somehow improper. “Yes,” he said, “she was clothed.”

“With any luck,” I said, hoping I spoke the truth, “they won’t rape her. She’s more valuable unharmed.”

“Valuable?”