sword and shield, so my shield was slung on my back and I had to snatch at the rungs one by one with my left hand while holding Serpent-Breath in my right and a Dane caught hold of her blade with a gloved hand and tried to pull her from my grasp, and I ripped her backward and lost my balance and fell onto a corpse, and then Edward began to climb the same ladder. He wore a helmet circled with gold and surmounted by a plume of swan’s feathers that made him a target and I could see the Danes waiting to snatch him over the rampart so they could take his fine armor, but then Steapa knocked the ladder sideways so that the ?theling fell into the mud.
“Dear God,” I heard Edward say in a mild voice, as though he had spilled some milk or ale, and that made me laugh. The handle of a thrown ax banged on my helmet. I turned, picked up the weapon, and slung it at the faces above me, but it went wide. Father Coenwulf helped Edward to his feet. “You shouldn’t be here,” I snarled at the priest, but he ignored me. He was a brave man for he wore no armor and carried no weapons. Steapa covered Edward with his huge shield as the spears hurtled down. Somehow Father Coenwulf survived the blades. He held a crucifix toward the jeering Danes and shouted a curse at them.
“Bring ladders here!” a voice bellowed. “Bring them here!” It was Father Pyrlig. “Ladders!” he shouted again, then he took a hive from one of his men and turned to the wall. “Have some honey!” he roared at the Danes and tossed the hive upward.
The wall was around ten feet high and it took strength to throw that sealed hive up over the parapet. The Danes cannot have known what the hive was, perhaps they mistook it for a boulder, though they surely knew no man could throw a boulder that far. I saw a sword slash at the hive, then it disappeared over the parapet. “Another!” Pyrlig shouted.
The first hive must have landed on the fighting platform. And it must have broken.
The hives were sealed. Brun had waited till the cool of the evening, when all the bees had returned home, and then he had closed off the entrances with mud and dung. Now the first hive’s shell, which was nothing but dried cow dung braced with hazel twigs, split like an eggshell.
And the bees came out.
Pyrlig threw a second hive and another man hurled a third. One failed to cross the parapet and fell back to the mud where, miraculously, it did not shatter. Two others were floating in the moat. I never did discover what happened to the rest of the hives, but the first two were sufficient.
Bees began to do our work. Thousands and thousands of angry, confused bees spread among the Danish defenders and I heard sudden shouts of startled pain. Men were being stung on their faces and hands, and the small distraction was all we needed. Pyrlig was bellowing at men to get the ladders set. Edward placed a ladder himself and tried to climb it, but Steapa thrust him aside and went first. I climbed another.
I cannot tell you how the fort at Beamfleot was taken, because I can recall nothing but the chaos. Chaos and bee stings. I do know that Steapa reached the top of the ladder and cleared a space by swinging a war ax so wildly that the blade very nearly slashed through my wolf-crested helmet, and then he was over the parapet and using the ax with murderous efficiency. Edward followed. Bees flickered all around him.
“Shout at your men,” I told him, “tell them to join you!”
He looked wild-eyed at me, then he understood. “For Wessex!” he shouted from the wall.
“For Mercia!” I bellowed, and now men were joining us fast. I did not feel the bee stings, though later I discovered I had been stung at least a dozen times, but we had been expecting to be stung, while the Danes were taken by surprise. They recovered fast enough. I heard a woman’s voice screaming at them to kill us, and I knew Skade was close by. A group came along the platform and I faced them with shield and sword, took an ax strike on the shield and gouged Serpent-Breath into the man’s knee, and Cerdic was with me, and Steapa came to my left and we were screaming like demons as we forced our way along the wall’s wooden platform. A spear struck my helmet, knocking it askew. The sun was still showing beneath the clouds, casting a long-shadowed, dazzling brilliance, and its light flashed from sword-blade and ax-edge and spear-point, and I was shoving the shield into the Danes, stabbing Serpent-Breath past its edge, and Steapa was howling and using his massive strength to thrust the defenders aside, and everywhere, everywhere, were bees. A Dane tried to kill me with an ax blow that I took on my shield and I remember his open mouth, yellow stumps of teeth and bees crawling on his tongue. Edward, just behind me, killed that Dane with a sword thrust into his mouth so that the bees were washed out by the gush of blood. Someone had fetched the dragon banner of Wessex and was waving it from the captured parapet, and men were cheering as they crossed the moat and climbed the remaining ladders.
I had turned left at the wall’s top and was fighting my way along the narrow platform, and Steapa had understood why, and he did most to clear the defenders in front of us so we could reach the larger platform that stood above the gate. And there we made our shield wall, and there we fought against the Danes as Pyrlig and his men used their axes on the big gate.
I must have shouted at the Danes, though what I cannot tell now. The usual insults. And the Danes fought back with a wild ferocity, but now we had our best warriors on the wall and more were coming all the time, so many that some jumped down into the fort and the fighting began there. One man kicked the shattered remains of a hive down into the fort and more bees swarmed out, but I was above the gate, protected now by the corpses of Danes who had tried to evict us. They still came. Their best weapons were heavy spears that they lunged over the corpse-barrier, but our shields were stout. “We need to get down to the gate!” I shouted at Steapa.
Osferth heard me. It had been Osferth who leaped from the gate’s top when we had defended Lundene, and now he leaped again. There were other Saxons inside the fort, but they were horribly outnumbered and were dying fast. Osferth did not care. He jumped to the ground just inside the gate. He sprawled for a moment, then was on his feet and shouting. “Alfred! Alfred! Alfred!”
I thought it was a strange war cry, especially from a man who resented his natural father as much as Osferth, but it worked. Other West Saxons leaped to join Osferth who was fending off two Danes with his shield and hacking his sword at two others.
“Alfred!” Another man took up the shout, then Edward gave a great scream and leaped off the rampart to join his half-brother. “Alfred!”
“Protect the ?theling,” I shouted.
Steapa, who regarded his first duty as keeping Edward alive, jumped down. I stayed on the rampart with Cerdic because we had to stop the Danes from recapturing the stretch of wall where our ladders were set. My shield was battered with spears. The linden wood was splintering, but the corpses at our feet were an obstacle and more than one Dane stumbled on the bodies to add his own to the pile. Still they came. A man started clearing the bodies away, tipping them down inside the fort, and I lunged Serpent-Breath into his armpit. Another Dane thrust a spear at me. I took the thrust on my shield and sliced Serpent-Breath back at the grimacing face framed by a bright steel helmet, but the man twisted aside. I saw him glance down and knew he was thinking of leaping down to attack my men below and I stepped onto a corpse and stabbed Serpent-Breath under his shield, twisting her as she tore into the flesh of his upper thigh, and he slammed his shield at me, then Cerdic was beside me and his ax chopped into the spearman’s shoulder. My shield was heavy with the weight of two spears that were lodged in the wood. I tried to shake them off, then ducked as a huge Dane, bellowing curses, charged me with an ax that he swung at my helmet. He crashed bodily into my shield, helpfully dislodging the spears, and Sihtric split the man’s helmet with an ax. I remember seeing blood drip from the rim of my shield, then I hurled the dying man off. The man was shaking as he died. I rammed Serpent-Breath over his body and the blade jarred on a Danish shield. Below me I heard the swelling shouts. “Alfred!” they bellowed, then “Edward! Edward!”
Steapa was worth any three men and he was killing with his huge strength and his uncanny sword-craft, but he had help now. More and more men leaped down to make a shield wall just inside the closed gate. Osferth and Edward were shield-neighbors. Father Coenwulf, who was determined to stay close to the ?theling, had leaped down and he now turned and lifted the gate’s locking bar. For a moment he could not push the gate open because Pyrlig’s axmen were still chopping at its huge timbers, then they heard Coenwulf’s shouts that they should stop. And so the gates opened and, under the rising sun, and beneath the smoke and amidst the swarming bees, we took death to Beamfleot.
The Danes had been surprised by our attack. They had thought Steapa’s men were withdrawing in the dawn, and instead we had assaulted them, but the surprise had not lessened their resolve, nor had it given us any great advantage. They had recovered fast, they had defended the wall stoutly, and if we had not sent the bees to join the fight they would surely have repulsed us. But a man being stung by a swarm of enraged bees cannot fight properly, and so we had been given that small chance to reach the parapet, and now we had opened the gate and Saxons were scrambling across the moat and charging into the fort, and the Danes, sensing disaster, broke.
