good fortune must hold. This was the wild hunt, and Harald had loosed his men and sent them to deliver him the King of Wessex.
We led them, we enticed them, and we tempted them. We did not ride as fast as we might; instead we kept the pursuing Danes in sight and only once did they catch us. Rypere, one of my valued men, was riding wide to our right and his horse thrust a hoof into a molehill. He was thirty paces away, but I heard the crack of breaking bone and saw Rypere tumbling and the horse flailing as it collapsed in screaming pain. I turned Smoka toward him and saw a small group of Danes coming fast. I shouted at another of my men, “Spear!”
I grabbed his heavy ash-shafted spear and headed straight toward the leading Danes who were spurring to kill Rypere. Finan had turned with me, as had a dozen others, and the Danes, seeing us, tried to swerve away, but Smoka was pounding the earth now, nostrils wide, and I lowered the spear and caught the nearest Dane in the side of his chest. The ash shaft jarred back, my gloved hand slid along the wood, but the spear-point pierced deep and blood was welling and spilling in the spaces between the links of the Dane’s mail coat. I let the spear go. The dying man stayed in his saddle as a second Dane flailed at me with a sword, but I threw the stroke off with my shield and turned Smoka by the pressure of my knees as Finan ripped his long blade across another man’s face. I snatched the reins from the man I had speared and dragged his horse to Rypere. “Throw the bastard off and get up,” I called.
The surviving Danes had retreated. There had been fewer than a dozen and they were the forerunners, the men on the fastest horses, and it took time for reinforcements to reach them and by then we had spurred safely away. Rypere’s legs were too short to reach his new stirrups, and he was cursing as he clung to the saddle’s pommel. Finan was smiling. “That’ll annoy them, lord,” he said.
“I want them mad,” I said.
I wanted them to be impetuous, careless, and confident. Already, on that summer’s day, as we followed the road alongside a meandering stream where crowsfoot grew thick, Harald was doing all I could ask. And was I confident? It is a dangerous thing to assume that your enemy will do what you want, but on that Thor’s Day I had a growing conviction that Harald was falling into a carefully laid trap.
Our road led to the ford where we could cross the river to reach Fearnhamme. If we had truly been fleeing to Wintanceaster we would have stayed south of the river and taken the Roman road which led west, and I wanted the Danes to believe that was our intention. So, when we reached the river, we stopped just south of the ford. I wanted our pursuers to see us, I wanted them to think we were indecisive, I wanted them, eventually, to think we panicked.
The land was open, a stretch of river meadow where folk grazed their goats and sheep. To the east, where the Danes were coming, was woodland, to the west was the road Harald would expect us to take, and to the north were the crumbling stone piers of the bridge the Romans had made across the Wey. Fearnhamme and its low hill were on the ruined bridge’s farther side. I stared at the hill and could see no troops.
“That’s where I wanted Aldhelm,” I snarled, pointing to the hill.
“Lord!” Finan shouted in warning.
The pursuing Danes were gathering at the edge of a wood a half-mile eastward. They could see us clearly, and they understood that we were too many to attack until more pursuers arrived, but those reinforcements were appearing by the minute. I looked across the river again and saw no one. The hill, with its ancient earthwork, was supposed to be my anvil strengthened with five hundred Mercian warriors, yet it looked deserted. Would my two hundred men be enough?
“Lord!” Finan called again. The Danes, who now outnumbered us by two to one, were spurring their horses toward us.
“Through the ford!” I shouted. I would spring the trap anyway, and so we kicked our tired horses through the deep ford which lay just upstream of the bridge and, once across, I called for my men to gallop to the hill’s top. I wanted the appearance of panic. I wanted it to look as though we had abandoned our ambitions to reach Wintanceaster and instead were taking refuge on the nearest hill.
We rode through Fearnhamme. It was a huddle of thatched huts around a stone church, though there was one fine-looking Roman building that had lost its tiled roof. There were no inhabitants, just a single cow bellowing pathetically because she needed to be milked. I assumed the folk had fled from the rumors of the approaching Danes. “I hope your damned men are on the hill!” I shouted to ?thelfl?d, who was staying close to me.
“They’ll be there!” she called back.
She sounded confident, but I was dubious. Aldhelm’s first duty, at least according to her husband, was to keep the Mercian army intact. Had he simply refused to advance on Fearnhamme? If he had, then I would be forced to fight off an army of Danes with just two hundred men, and those Danes were approaching fast. They smelled victory and they pounded their horses through the river and up into Fearnhamme’s street. I could hear their shouts, and then I reached the grassy bank that was the ancient earthwork and, as Smoka crested the bank’s summit, I saw that ?thelfl?d was right. Aldhelm had come, and he had brought five hundred men. They were all there, but Aldhelm had kept them at the northern side of the old fortress so they would be hidden from an enemy approaching from the south.
And so, just as I had planned, I had seven hundred men on the hill, and another seven hundred, I hoped, approaching from ?scengum, and between those two forces were some two thousand rampaging, careless, overconfident Danes who believed they were about to achieve the old Viking dream of conquering Wessex.
“Shield wall!” I shouted at my men. “Shield wall!”
The Danes had to be checked for a moment, and the easiest way to do that was to show them a shield wall at the hill’s top. There was a moment of chaos as men slid from their saddles and ran to the bank’s top, but these were good men, well trained, and their shields locked together fast. The Danes, coming from the houses onto the hill’s lower slope, saw the wall of iron-bound willow, they saw the spears, the swords and the ax blades, and they saw the steepness of the slope, and their wild charge stopped. Scores of men were crossing the river and still more were coming from the trees on the southern bank, so in a few moments they would have more than enough warriors to overwhelm my short shield wall, but for now they paused.
“Banners!” I said. We had brought our banners, my wolf’s-head flag and Wessex’s dragon, and I wanted them flown as an invitation to Harald’s men.
Aldhelm, tall and sallow, had come to greet me. He did not like me and his face showed that dislike, but it also showed astonishment at the number of Danes who converged on the ford.
“Divide your men into two,” I told him peremptorily, “and line them either side of my men. Rypere!”
“Lord?”
“Take a dozen men and tether those horses!” Our abandoned horses were wandering the hilltop and I feared some would stray back over the bank.
“How many Danes are there?” Aldhelm asked.
“Enough to give us a day’s good killing,” I said. “Now bring your men here.”
He bridled at my tone. He was a thin man, elegant in a superb long coat of mail that had bronze crescent moons sewn to the links. He had a cloak of blue linen, lined with red cloth, and he wore a chain of heavy gold looped twice about his neck. His boots and gloves were black leather, his sword belt was decorated with golden crosses, while his long black hair, scented and oiled, was held at the nape of his neck with a comb of ivory teeth clasped in a golden frame. “I have my orders,” he said distantly.
“Yes, to bring your men here. We have Danes to kill.”
He had always disliked me, ever since I had spoiled his handsome looks by breaking his jaw and his nose, though on that far day he had been armed and I had not. He could barely bring himself to look at me, instead he stared at the Danes gathering at the foot of the hill. “I am instructed,” he said, “to preserve the Lord ?thelred’s forces.”
“Your instructions have changed, Lord Aldhelm.” A cheerful voice spoke from behind us, and Aldhelm turned to gaze in astonishment at ?thelfl?d, who smiled from her high saddle.
“My lady,” he said, bowing, then glancing from her to me. “Is the Lord ?thelred here?”
“My husband sent me to countermand his last orders,” ?thelfl?d said sweetly. “He is now so confident of victory that he requires you to stay here despite the numbers opposing us.”
Aldhelm began to reply, then assumed I did not know what his last orders from ?thelred had been. “Your husband sent you, my lady?” he asked instead, plainly confused by ?thelfl?d’s unexpected presence.
“Why else would I be here?” ?thelflaed asked beguilingly, “and if there were any real danger, my lord, would
