fended off the first with Serpent-Breath. The second hammered my shield with his axe, and the third circled behind me and I turned fast, scything Serpent-Breath, shouted that I was a Saxon, but they did not hear me. Then Steapa slammed into them and they scattered, and Pyrlig grabbed my arm, but I shook him off and ran towards Ragnar, who was snarling at the ring of enemies, inviting any one of them to try to kill him. His banner had fallen and his crewmen were dead, but he looked like a war god in his shining mail and with his splintered shield and his long sword and his defiant face, and then the ring began to close. I ran, shouting, and he turned towards me, thinking I had come to kill him, and he raised his sword and I brushed it aside with my shield, threw my arms around him and drove him to the turf.
Steapa and Pyrlig guarded us. They fended off the Saxons, telling them to look for other victims, and I rolled away from Ragnar, who sat up and looked at me with astonishment. I saw that his shield hand was bloody. A blade, cutting through the limewood, had sliced into his palm, hacking down between the fingers so that it looked as though he had two small hands instead of one.
'I must bind that wound,' I said.
'Uhtred,' he just said, as if he did not really believe it was me.
'I looked for you,' I told him, 'because I did not want to fight you.'
He flinched as he shook the shattered remnants of the shield away from his wounded hand. I could see Bishop Alewold running across the fort in mud-spattered robes, waving his arms and shouting that God had delivered the pagans into our hands.
'I told Guthrum to fight outside the fort,' Ragnar said. 'We would have killed you all.'
'You would,' I agreed. By staying in the fort, Guthrum had let us defeat his army piece by piece, but even so it was a miracle that the day was ours.
'You're bleeding,' Ragnar said. I had taken a spear blade in the back of my right thigh. I have the scar to this day.
Pyrlig cut a strip of cloth from a dead man's jerkin and used it to bind Ragnar's hand. He wanted to bandage my thigh, but the bleeding had lessened and I managed to stand, though the pain, which I had not felt ever since the wound had been given, suddenly struck me. I touched Thor's hammer. We had won.
'They killed my woman,' I told Ragnar.
He said nothing, but just stood beside me and, because my thigh was agony and I suddenly felt weak, I put an arm about his shoulders.
'Iseult, she was called,' I said, 'and my son is dead too.' I was glad it was raining or else the tears on my face would have shown.
'Where's Brida?'
'I sent her down the hill,' Ragnar told me. We were limping together towards the fort's northern ramparts.
'And you stayed?'
'Someone had to stay as a rearguard,' he said bleakly. I think he was crying too, because of the shame of the defeat. It was a battle Guthrum' could not lose, yet he had.
Pyrlig and Steapa were still with me, and I could see Eadric stripping a dead Dane of his mail, but there was no sign of Leofric. I asked Pyrlig where he was, and Pyrlig gave me a pained look and shook his head.
'Dead?' I asked.
'An axe,' he said, 'in the spine.' I was numb, too numb to speak, for it did not seem possible that the indestructible Leofric was dead, but he was, and I wished I could give him a Danish funeral, a fire-funeral, so that the smoke of his corpse would rise to the halls of the gods. 'I'm sorry,' Pyrlig said.
'The price of Wessex,' I said, and then we climbed the northern ramparts, that were crowded with Alfred's soldiers.
The rain was lessening, though it still fell in great swathes across the plain below. It was as if we stood on the rim of the world, and ahead of us was an immensity of cloud and rain, while beneath us, on the long steep slope, hundreds of Danes scrambled to the foot of the escarpment where their horses had been left.
'Guthrum,' Ragnar said bitterly. 'He lives!'
'He was the first to run,' he said. 'Svein told him we should fight outside the walls,' he went on, 'but Guthrum feared defeat more than he ever wanted victory.'
A cheer sounded as Alfred's banners were carried across the captured fort to the northern ramparts. Alfred, mounted again, and with a bronze circlet about his helmet, rode with the flags Beocca was on his knees giving thanks, while Alfred had a dazed smile and a look of disbelief, and I swear he wept as his standards were rammed into the turf at the world's edge. The dragon and the cross flew above his kingdom that had almost been lost, but had been saved so that there was still one Saxon King in England.
But Leofric was dead and Iseult was a corpse and a hard rain fell across the land we had rescued.
The
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The Westbury white horse is cut into the chalk of the escarpment beneath Bratton Camp on the edge of the Wiltshire Downs. From the north it can be seen for miles, The present horse, a handsome beast, is over a hundred feet long and almost two hundred feet high and was cut in the 1770s, making it the oldest of Wiltshire's ten white horses, but local legend says that it replaced a much older horse that was blazoned into the chalk hillside after the battle of Ethandun in 878.
