Rumwald had made a shield wall across the road. Behind it were bodies, some moving, most motionless in puddles of their blood. Father Oda was shouting at the East Anglians, telling them their war was over, that God Almighty had sent King Æthelstan to bring peace and plenty. I let him harangue them and went back to the parapet where terrified West Saxons, relieved of their weapons, were being forced to jump off the high bastion into the filth of the flooded ditch. ‘The shit will kill them if they don’t drown,’ Finan said.
‘We have to barricade the parapet,’ I said, ‘both ways.’
‘We will,’ Finan said.
We had taken the twin bastions and the arch’s fighting platform between them, and Rumwald’s men, beating swords against shields, were driving back a larger number of East Anglians who seemed reluctant to fight and equally reluctant to surrender. I knew we would be attacked down there soon, but the immediate danger came from the men manning the walls on either side of the gate. For the moment, dazed and confused by our sudden assault, they were holding back, but other men were running along the walls, coming to retake the gate.
They were coming because Immar had pulled down the leaping stag and hoisted the blood-drenched banner of King Æthelstan. The dragon and the lightning bolt now flew above the Crepelgate, and revenge for that was coming.
The Crepelgate. Under the pitiless midday sun we had to hold the gate, and I remembered that Alfred, distressed by the number of maimed and blinded folk in Lundene, many of them men he had led into battle, had issued a decree allowing cripples to beg from travellers at this gate. Was that an omen? We had to defend the gate now and the fight would surely make more cripples. I touched the silver hammer, then cleaned the blood from my borrowed sword and slid her back into her scabbard.
And knew she must be drawn again soon.
Thirteen
The enemy’s first response was ragged, brave, and ineffectual. The troops manning the long stretches of the wall either side of the captured Crepelgate attacked along the ramparts, but a shield wall of just four men could easily defend the width of the fighting platform. A dozen men, arrayed in three ranks, would be an even more formidable obstacle, but the day’s heat and the undoubted ferocity of the enemy’s attacks would wear that small force down fast, so I had men bringing stones from the nearby ruins. We piled them on the fighting platform to make two crude barricades, and by the time the wall’s defenders to our west had organised a disciplined assault, our makeshift wall was already knee high. Gerbruht and Folcbald led that defence, using the spears we had captured from the West Saxons, and within a short time the knee-high wall was heightened by mail-clad corpses. Wihtgar, to the east, faced less opposition, and his men went on piling stones.
Brihtwulf had left the city and vanished among the far trees, but neither he nor any of Æthelstan’s men had reappeared. Inside the gate the East Anglians had retreated fifty or more paces, and Father Oda was still shouting at them, but they had not dropped their shields nor lowered their banner, which showed a crudely embroidered boar’s head.
Everything was now happening either very fast or painfully slowly. It was fast on the wall’s top where we piled still more stones as vengeful West Saxons assaulted both crude barricades, but it was slow inside the city where Rumwald’s shield wall stood ready to defend the open gate against an East Anglian force that showed no desire to attack. Yet I knew it was there, on the road between the rubble and weeds of the ruined city, that this fight would be decided.
The West Saxons on the eastern reach of the wall had been reluctant to attack at first, and had given Wihtgar’s men the chance to make their stone barrier chest high. The enemy there hurled spears over the crude wall, but after the first attackers tried to clamber over the heap of stones and were met by spears thrusting from below, they were more cautious. Yet to the west the fighting was far more vicious. The pile of stones was broad there, but only knee high, and the enemy kept coming, urged on by a black-bearded man in polished mail and wearing a glittering helmet. He shouted his troops forward, though I noted he never joined them as they charged with shields held high and spears levelled. He was screaming at them to kill, to charge faster, and that was a mistake. Men hurried to cross the crude barrier and their haste made them trip on the stones and they came to our shield wall raggedly only to be met by swords, spears, and axes. Their fallen bodies made an ever-growing barrier on top of the first, a new barrier made worse by the men dying in agony who were trodden underfoot by other men trying to cross the blood-soaked obstacle.
‘The wall will hold,’ Finan told me. We were standing halfway up the steps, he was watching the fight above as I stared west towards Lundene’s higher hill.
‘The men need ale or water,’
