them, laughed at them, and capered up and down as Eofer's arrows slammed into ships' timbers. Only the one man had been wounded, but we had driven them backwards and that was humiliating to them. I let Eofer loose twenty arrows, then I waded into the river and took hold of his bow. I stood in front of him so the Danes could not see what I was doing.
'Tell him not to worry,' I told the girl, and she soothed Eofer, who was frowning at me and trying to remove his bow from my grasp.
I drew a knife and that alarmed him even more. He growled at me, then plucked the bow from my hand.
'Tell him it's all right,' I told the girl, and she soothed her uncle who then let me half sever the woven hemp bowstring. I stepped away from him and pointed at a group of Danes. 'Kill them,' I said.
Eofer did not want to draw the bow. Instead he fumbled under his greasy woollen cap and produced a second bowstring, but I shook my head and the small girl persuaded him he must use the half-severed cord and so he pulled it nervously back and, just before it reached the full draw, the string snapped and the arrow span crazily into the sky to float away on the river.
The tide had turned and the water was rising. 'We go!' I shouted to my men.
It was now the Danes' turn to jeer at us. They thought we were retreating because our one bowstring had broken, and so they shouted insults as we clambered back up the muddy bluff, and then I saw two men running along the far beach and I hoped they were carrying the orders I wanted.
They were. The Danes, released from the threat of Eofer's terrible how, were going to launch two of their smaller ships. We had stung them, laughed at them and now they would kill us.
All warriors have pride. Pride and rage and ambition are the goads to a reputation, and the Danes did not want us to think we had stung them without being punished for our temerity. They wanted to teach us a lesson. But they also wanted more. Before we left ?thelingaeg I had insisted that my men be given every available coat of mail. Egwine, who had stayed behind with the king, had been reluctant to give up his precious armour, but Alfred had ordered it and so sixteen of my men were dressed in chain mail. They looked superb, like an elite group of warriors, and the Danes would win renown if they defeated such a group and captured the precious armour. Leather offers some protection, but chain mail over leather is far better and far more expensive, and by taking sixteen coats of mail to the river's edge I had given the Danes an irresistible lure. And they snapped at it.
We were going slowly, deliberately seeming to struggle in the soft ground as we headed back towards Palfleot. The Danes were also struggling, shoving their two ships down the riverbank's thick mud, but at last the boats were launched and then, on the hurrying flood tide, the Danes did what I had hoped they would do.
They did not cross the river. If they had crossed, then they would merely have found themselves on the Pedredan's eastern bank and we would have been half a mile ahead and out of reach, so instead the commander did what he thought was the clever thing to do. He tried to cut us off. They had seen us land at Palfleot and they reckoned our boats must still be there, and so they rowed their ships up river to find those boats and destroy them.
Except our punts were not at Palfleot. They had been taken north and east, so that they were waiting for us in a reed-fringed dyke, but now was not the time to use them. Instead, as the Danes went ashore at Palfleot, we made a huddle on the sand, watching them, and they thought we were trapped, and now they were on the same side of the river as us and the two ships' crews outnumbered us by over two to one, and they had all the confidence in the world as they advanced from the burned pilings of Palfleot to kill us in the swamp.
They were doing exactly what I wanted them to do. And we now retreated. We went back raggedly, sometimes running to open a distance between us and the confident Danes. I counted seventy-six of them and we were only thirty strong because some of my men were with the hidden punts, and the Danes knew we were dead men and they hurried across the sand and creeks, and we had to go faster, ever faster, to keep them away from us. It began to rain, the drops carried on the freshening west wind and I kept looking into the rain until at last I saw a silver bar of light glint and spill across the swamp's edge and knew the incoming tide was beginning its long fast race across the barren flats. And still we went back, and still the Danes pursued us, but they were tiring now. A few shouted at us, daring us to stand and fight, but others had no breath to shout, just a savage intent to catch and kill us, but we were slanting eastwards now towards a line of buckthorn and reeds, and there, in a flooding creek, were our punts. We dropped into the boats, exhausted, and the marsh men poled us back down the creek that was a tributary of the River Bru which barred the northern part of the swamp, and the flat-bottomed craft took us fast south, against the current, hurrying us past the Danes who could only watch from a quarter-mile away and do nothing to stop us, and the farther we went from them, the more isolated they looked in that wide, barren place where the rain fell and the tide seethed as it flowed into the creek beds. The winddriven water was running deep into the swamp now, a tide made bigger by the full moon, and suddenly the Danes saw their danger and turned back towards Palfleot.
But Palfleot was a long way off, and we had already left the stream and were carrying the. punts to a smaller creek, one that ran down to the Pedredan, and that stream took us to where the blackened pilings leaned against the weeping sky, and where the Danes had tied their two ships. The two craft were guarded by only four men, and we came from the punts with a savage shout and drawn swords and the four men ran. The other Danes were still out in the swamp, only now it was not a swamp, but a tidal flat and they were wading through water.
And I had two ships. We hauled the punts aboard, and then the marsh men, divided between the ships, took the oars, and I steered one and Leofric took the other, and we rowed against that big tide towards Cynuit where the Danish ships were now unguarded except for a few men and a crowd of women and children who watched the two ships come and did not know they were crewed by their enemy. They must have wondered why so few oars bit the water, but how could they imagine that forty Saxons would defeat nearly eighty Danes? And so none opposed us as we ran the ships into the bank, and there I led my warriors ashore.
'You can fight us,' I shouted at the few ship-guards left, 'or you can live.'
I was in chain mail, with my new helmet. I was a warlord. 1 banged Serpent-Breath against the big shield and stalked towards them. 'Fight if you want!' I shouted. 'Come and fight us!'
They did not. They were too few and so they retreated south and could only watch as we burned their ships. It took most of the day to ensure that the ships burned down to their keels, but burn they did, and their fires were a signal to the western part of Wessex that Svein had been defeated. He was not at Cynuit that day, but somewhere to the south, and as the ships burned I watched the wooded hills in fear that he would come with hundreds of men, but he was still far off and the Danes at Cynuit could do nothing to stop us. We burned twenty-three ships, including the White Horse, and the twenty-fourth, which was one of the two we had captured, carried us away as evening fell. We took good plunder from the Danish camp; food, rigging ropes, hides, weapons and shields.
There were a score of Danes stranded on the low island of Palfleot. The rest had died in the rising water. The survivors watched us pass, but did nothing to provoke us, and I did nothing to hurt them.
We rowed on towards ?thelingaeg and behind us, under a darkening sky, the water sheeted the swamp where white gulls cried above the drowned men and where, in the dusk, two swans flighted northwards, their wings like drumbeats in the sky.
