being driven away from us, and Svein and his horsemen were panicking them. The fyrd had been eight hundred strong, ranked firm, and now they were shattered into small groups that huddled together for protection and tried to fend off the galloping horsemen who thrust with their long spears. Bodies lay all across the turf. Some of Osric's men were wounded and crawled south as if there might be safety where the women and horses were gathered around a mounded grave of the old folk, but the horsemen turned and speared them, and the un-mounted Danes were making new shield walls to attack the fugitives. We could do nothing to help, for we were still fighting Guthrum's men who had come from the fort and, though we were winning that fight, we could not turn our backs on the enemy. So we thrust and hacked and pushed, and slowly they went backwards, and then they realised that they were dying man by man, and I heard the Danish shouts to go back to the fort, and we let them go. They retreated from us, walking backwards, and when they saw we would not follow, they turned and ran to the green walls. They left a tide line of corpses, sixty or seventy Danes on the turf, and we had lost no more than twenty men. I took a silver chain off one corpse, two arm rings from another and a fine bonehandled knife with a knob of amber in its hilt from a third.
'Back!' Alfred called.
It was not till we retreated to where we had begun the fight that I realised the disaster on our right.
We had been the centre of Alfred's army, but now we were its right wing, and what had been our strong right flank was splintered chaos. Many of Osric's men had retreated to where the women and horses waited, and they made a shield wall there which served to protect them, but most of the fyrd had fled farther east and was being carved into smaller and smaller groups.
Svein at last hauled his men back from the pursuit, but by then nearly all our right wing was gone.
Many of those men lived, but they had been driven from the field and would be reluctant to come back and take more punishment. Osric himself had survived, and he brought the two hundred men who had retreated to the women and horses back to Alfred, but that was all he had left. Svein formed his men again, facing us, and I could see him haranguing them.
'They're coming for us,' I said.
'God will protect us,' Pyrlig said. He had blood on his face. A sword or axe had pierced his helmet and cut open his scalp so that blood was crusted thick on his left cheek.
'Where was your shield?' I demanded of ?thelwold.
'I've got it,' he said. He looked pale and frightened.
'You're supposed to protect Pyrlig's head,' I snarled at him.
'It's nothing,' Pyrlig tried to calm my anger.
?thelwold looked as if he would protest, then suddenly jerked forward and vomited. I turned away from him. I was angry, but I was also disappointed. The bowel-loosening fear was gone, but the fighting had seemed half- hearted and ineffective. We had seen off the Danes who had attacked us, but we had not hurt them so badly that they would abandon the fight. I wanted to feel the battle-rage, the screaming joy of killing, and instead all seemed ponderous and difficult.
I had looked for Ragnar during the fight, fearing having to fight my friend, and when the Danes had gone back to the fort I saw he had been engaged further down the line. I could see him now, on the rampart, staring at us, then I looked right, expecting to see Svein lead his men in an assault on us, but instead I saw Svein galloping to the fort and I suspected he went to demand reinforcements from Guthrum.
The battle was less than an hour old, yet now it paused. Some women brought us water and mouldy bread while the wounded sought what help they could find. I wrapped a rag around Eadric's left arm where an axe blade had gone through the leather of his sleeve.
'It was aimed at you, lord,' he said, grinning at me toothlessly.
I tied the rag into place. 'Does it hurt?'
'Bit of an ache,' he said, 'but not bad. Not bad.' He flexed his arm, found it worked and picked up his shield.
I looked again at Svein's men, but they seemed in no hurry to resume their attack. I saw a man tip a skin of water or ale to his mouth. Just ahead of us, among the line of dead, a man suddenly sat up.
He was Danish and had plaited black hair that had been tied in knots and decorated with ribbons. I had thought he was dead, but he sat up and stared at us with a look of indignation and then, seemingly, yawned. He was looking straight at me, his mouth open, and then a flood of blood rimmed and spilled over his lower lip to soak his beard. His eyes rolled white and he fell backwards.
Svein's men were still not moving. There were some eight hundred of them arrayed in their line.
They were still the left wing of Guthrum's army, but that wing was much smaller now that it had been shorn of Wulfhere's men, and so I turned and pushed through our ranks to find Alfred.
'Lord!' I called, getting his attention. 'Attack those men!' I pointed to Svein's troops. They were a good two hundred paces from the fort and, for the moment at least, without their leader because Svein was still inside the ramparts. Alfred looked down on me from his saddle and I urged him to attack with every man in the centre division of our army. The Danes had the escarpment at their back and I reckoned we could tip them down that treacherous slope.
Alfred listened to me, looked at Svein's men, then shook his head dumbly. Beocca was on his knees, hands spread wide and face screwed tight in an intensity of prayer.
'We can drive them off, lord,' I insisted.
'They'll come from the fort,' Alfred said, meaning that Guthrum's Danes would come to help Svein's men. Some would, but I doubted enough would come.
'But we want them out of the fort,' I insisted. 'They're easier to kill in open ground, lord.'
Alfred just shook his head again. I think, at that moment, he was almost paralysed by the fear of doing the wrong thing, and so he chose to do nothing. He wore a plain helmet with a nasal, no other protection for his face, and he looked sickly pale. He could not see an obvious opportunity, and so he would let the enemy make the next decision.
It was Svein who made it. He brought more Danes out of the fort, three or four hundred of them.
Most of Guthrum's men stayed behind the ramparts, but those men who had made the first attack on Alfred's bodyguard now streamed onto the open downland where they joined Svein's troops and made their shield wall. I could see Ragnar's banner among them.
