Now, as I led almost all of my three hundred men into the wind and rain, we avoided the Roman road. For much of its length it ran in a wide, shallow valley between pastures that, in turn, were edged by low thickly-wooded ridges. An enemy could watch the road from those trees, could gather men in their shelter and then ambush us. I suspected we had already been seen; Ingilmundr was no fool and surely had men watching Ceaster, but I chose concealment rather than make things easy for him to ambush us, and so led my men through the trees along the eastern ridge. We went slowly, threading the oaks and beeches as we followed Eadric, Oswi and Rolla, who scouted ahead on foot. Eadric was the oldest, almost as old as I was, and he took the ridge’s centre. He was the best scout I had, with an uncanny ability to stay concealed and to spot enemies who were similarly hiding. Oswi, an orphan from Lundene, lacked Eadric’s knowledge of the countryside, but he was cunning and intelligent, while Rolla, a Dane, was sharp-eyed and cautious till it came to a fight when he turned as vicious as a weasel. He was on the eastern flank of the ridge, and it was Rolla who alerted us to our first sight of the enemy. He beckoned urgently. I held up my hand to halt my men, dismounted, and, with Finan beside me, walked to join Rolla.
Finan was the first to respond. ‘Dear God,’ he breathed.
‘There’s a good few of them, eh?’ Rolla said.
I was counting an enemy column that was following the track that edged the River Mærse. The rear of the column was still out of sight, but I reckoned we could see four hundred mounted men heading inland. To our left I could just see the remnants of Brunanburh, the fortress Æthelflaed had ordered built on the bank of the Mærse. Maybe Leof was right, I thought ruefully, and the garrison at Ceaster did not have enough men to face Ingilmundr’s Norsemen.
‘Are those bastards trying to get behind us?’ Finan asked.
I shook my head. ‘Even if we were seen leaving Ceaster they wouldn’t have had enough time to assemble that force.’
‘I hope you’re right, lord,’ Rolla grunted.
‘Still more of them!’ Finan said, watching a new group of spearmen appearing past the burh’s ruins.
I sent my son with six men to warn Ceaster that some five hundred enemy horsemen were heading inland. ‘Leof will do sweet nothing,’ Finan grumbled.
‘He can warn the nearest settlements,’ I said.
The column slowly vanished. They had stayed on the coastal track, between the pasture land and the mudflats where dunlins, oystercatchers and curlews flocked. The tide was low. If they had wanted to trap us, I thought, they would have used the other ridge, hidden there by the trees and ready to cross the low wide valley to cut off our retreat. ‘We go on,’ I said.
‘If he’s sent five hundred men inland,’ Egil asked when I rejoined the horsemen, ‘how many does he have left?’
‘Maybe not enough,’ his brother Thorolf said wolfishly. Egil, the eldest of the three brothers, was thin, handsome, and amusing. He approached battle like a man playing tæfl, cautiously, thoughtfully, looking for an enemy’s weakness before he struck with serpent speed. Thorolf, two years younger, was all warrior; big, black-bearded, grim-faced, and never happier than when he had his long-hafted war axe in his hand. He went into battle like an enraged bull, confident in his size and skill. Berg, the youngest, whose life I had saved, was more like Egil, but lacked his oldest brother’s keen intelligence. He might have been the best sword-warrior of the three, all of whom were likeable, dependable, and skilled in battle.
The three brothers now rode with me as we went still deeper into Wirhealum. To our right was the wide Mærse, its mudbanks white with birds, while to our left the rich pastures of the vale had given way to heathland across which the Roman road ran spear-straight. We had passed the last of the destroyed steadings and ahead of us we could see other farms still standing, meaning we were crossing the invisible line between the Saxon part of the peninsula and the Norse settlements.
And for a time it seemed as if Wirhealum was at peace. We saw no more armed men.
There was a moment, a heartbeat, when that wide landscape was almost as still and silent as a grave. Rooks flew towards the Mærse, far off to our left a child drove three cows towards a palisaded steading, while flood waters glinted in the wide shallow valley. A kingfisher flashed across a stream that twisted sinuously between its deep muddy banks. The stream was high after the recent rain, its water turbid and turbulent. On the far ridge the trees grew thick, the oak leaves golden, the beeches a fiery red, the leaves all heavy and still in the windless air.
It was a strange moment. I felt as if the world held its breath. I was gazing at peace, at pasture, at the green good land that men wanted. The Welsh had owned this land once and they had seen the Romans come and the Romans go, and then the Saxons had come and they had bloodied the earth with sword and spear and the Welsh names had vanished because the Saxons took the land and gave it their own name. They called it Wirhealum which meant the pasture where the bog-myrtle grows, and I remembered Æthelstan, just a boy, killing a man beside a ditch thick with bog-myrtle, and how Æthelflaed, Alfred’s daughter, had once asked me to collect leaves of bog-myrtle because it kept the fleas away. But nothing had kept the Norse away. They came on bended knee, begging to be given poor land, swearing peace, and both Æthelflaed and
