War of the Wolf Read online

  None of us said anything. None of us wanted to retreat, but nor did we want to carry our spears against that formidable fortress. “It will have to be fast,” Sigtryggr said.

  “The journey south?” Svart spoke for the first time.

  “The assault,” Sigtryggr said. “There’ll be precious little water on that hill,” he nodded to the land to the west of the hill, “and no shelter. We’ll have to reach that hill, form the wall, and attack.”

  “There are horses in the fort,” Finan said.

  “Why wouldn’t there be?” Sigtryggr asked irritably.

  “We make a shield wall, lord King, and the bastard could release horsemen onto our flanks.”

  Sigtryggr grunted, plainly unhappy at Finan’s words, but unable to deny their truth. “What choice do we have?” he asked. He was plainly reluctant to abandon an assault. We had marched so long, we had Sköll in front of us, and to retreat was to gamble on finding a friendlier battlefield.

  “The Lord of Hosts is with you! You cannot fail!” a voice called from lower down the slope, and I turned to see Ieremias spurring his horse Beelzebub to join us. Sigtryggr, who had less patience than I for the mad bishop, groaned. Ieremias was holding a stout staff on which he had managed to tie the ram’s skull that, as he joined us, he pointed toward the fort. “The far corner, lords,” he said, “that is where the heathen can best be smitten.”

  Sigtryggr looked annoyed, Svart was puzzled, but Finan knew that Ieremias had moments of sense. “The far corner?”

  “Ragnar assaulted from there!” Ieremias was pointing the ram’s skull at the northernmost corner of the fort, “and by God’s grace we smote Halfdan the Mad.”

  “How many men did Halfdan lead?” I asked.

  “A host, lord, a host,” Ieremias said. Plainly he did not know.

  “There’s a host and a half down there,” I pointed out.

  “The Lord of Hosts is with you, how can you lose?”

  “Easily,” Sigtryggr snarled, but I could see he was still reluctant to abandon an attack on the fort. He twisted in his saddle to look at me. “Ragnar?” he asked.

  “Knew what he was doing,” I answered. “He was good.”

  He turned to stare at the fort again. We could not see the ground beyond the northern corner because the land there dropped away, which meant it would be an uphill attack from ground we had not yet seen. “We can’t do it tomorrow,” Sigtryggr said, “we need to scout it first.” He paused, wanting someone to agree with his suggestion, but none of us spoke. “And if it looks impossible,” he finished, “we’ll march away.”

  “And if it’s possible?” Svart asked.

  “We attack,” Sigtryggr said.

  Which meant the Measurer, or rather the Norns, or perhaps both, would be measuring.

  Eleven

  War cries were loud. Ravens and eagles

  Were eager for corpse-meat, the earth trembled.

  Men let fly their spears, file sharpened,

  Bows were loosed, shields hard blade-struck,

  Bitter was the onslaught . . .

  “Onslaught,” I said quietly.

  Father Selwyn looked at me anxiously. “Is that the wrong word, lord?” he asked.

  I had not realized I had spoken aloud. “It’s the right word,” I assured the poet, “but I don’t remember any eagles.”

  “Could there have been eagles, lord?”

  “In those hills? I suppose so, yes. Their sorcerer called it the fortress of the eagles, so I suppose there must have been eagles.” I paused, then added, “And of course there was Berg’s banner.”

  “Berg’s banner, lord?”

  “You didn’t hear about that?”

  “No, lord.”

  “It showed an eagle,” I said, smiling, then fell silent.

  “Lord?” the young priest prompted me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, “think about eyes and lips instead.”

  “Eyes and what, lord?” he thought he had misheard me.

  “Eyes and lips,” I repeated. “They’re the first things the ravens eat. Eagles too, probably. They perch on the helmet rim and begin with the eyeballs, then tear off the lips. After that they rip up the cheeks. Have you ever eaten cod cheeks?”

  “Cod cheeks?”

  “They’re delicious. Fishermen usually toss the cod heads, but when I was a boy we used to scoop out the cheek-meat. Ravens seem to like the taste of our cheeks, unless of course you’ve laid the man’s skull open with an ax, then they feast on the brains first.”

  Father Selwyn had a boyish face and fair hair that fell across his eyes. He frowned. “I’m not sure I can put those things in a poem, lord,” he said faintly.

  “And after the ravens,” I went on, “the dogs come. Dogs, foxes, and wolves. They like corpse-meat too, but they start feeding lower down the corpse, usually . . .”

  “So really, lord,” Father Selwyn dared interrupt me, “the word onslaught can stay?”

  “It’s the right word,” I said again, “and bitter is right too.”

  War is bitter. The poets give battle a splendor, extolling the brave and exulting in victory, and bravery is worth their praise. Victory too, I suppose, but the poems, chanted in mead halls at night, give boys and young men their ambition to be warriors. Reputation! It is the one thing that outlives us. Men die, women die, all die, but reputation lives on like the echo of a song, and men crave reputation, as they crave the heavy arm rings that mark a warrior’s victories. We revel in reputation and I am as guilty as the next man, proud that when men speak of me they tell how I slew Ubba Lothbrokson, cut down Svein of the White Horse, killed Cnut Longsword, and defeated Ragnall the Sea King. But reputation does not remember the ravens tearing a man’s face, the weeping of men dying, or the weariness of victory. There is almost nothing harder than leading men to battle knowing that some will die, that young men we have trained to fight and come to love as comrades will whimper like infants. “It is better to talk,” Hrothweard, the archbishop, often told me, “than to kill,” but how does one talk to a man like Sköll, who craved reputation and claimed a kingdom and was willing that any number of young men should die to sate his appetite?

  I remember the ravens. They kept us company next day as we struggled to reach the place from where we could launch our onslaught. The ravens were big and glossy-black, raucous and hungry, and they seemed to know what feast we were preparing, and those preparations took all day as we left the Tine valley and crossed a high saddle of the hills to the southeast of Heahburh. Once across the saddle we dropped to another valley where a stream ran fast. Sköll must have watched us, but such was the skill of his scouts that we saw none of them, though once in a while a raven would fly from a boulder, and I suspected the bird had been disturbed, but when my own scouts climbed the heights they saw no one. Perhaps Sköll sent no scouts. He must have guessed we would attack from the high ground to the west and were hiding in the valley beyond. We would stay in the valley through the night, and our horses would stay there when we attacked at dawn. Sigtryggr sent twenty men down to the Tine with orders to light fires once night fell. I doubted Sköll would be fooled by the glow in the darkness into thinking we were camped there, but Sigtryggr wanted to put a small nagging doubt into his mind.

  I had a thousand nagging doubts. At dusk, just as the rain started, Sigtryggr, Finan, Sihtric, Svart, and I climbed to the hilltop with a dozen men to protect us. We lay on the coarse damp grass and stared down at the fort. The southern corner with its low tower faced us, and in front of the western wall I counted seven banked ditches. “He’ll expect us to attack there,” Sigtryggr said. “Across the ditches. It’s the easiest approach.”

  “Which is why there are ditches,” I said.

  “And your mad bishop thinks we should assault the northern corner?”

  “So do I,” I said. From our new vantage point I could see there was a ditch at that far corner, but it looked shallow, and beyond the ditch was a rough patch of land before t
he ground fell sharply away to a stream. There was a tower at that northern corner. I supposed it had once been made of stone, but now was a timber platform with a wall around its summit. A flag hung limp and damp from a pole on the tower.

  “We should do what he expects,” Sigtryggr said, “and attack from the hill. And maybe that will pull men away from the northern corner. Then we make a surprise assault from the north.”

  I was not sure how we were to spring that surprise. The defenders on the wall and the corner tower would be above us and could watch our movements. “That might work,” I said dubiously, “but he has plenty of men.” I could see my comment had annoyed Sigtryggr. He wanted to attack and was in no mood to hear of difficulties; he knew them anyway, and the persistent rain, that was being blown by an east wind and was hard enough to obscure our view of the fort, only added a new problem. “The bowstrings will be sloppy,” I added.

  “Bugger the bowstrings,” Sigtryggr snarled, but he knew I was right. In rain the bowstrings became slack. I had brought the archers to harass the men on the ramparts, and wet bowstrings would make the arrow strikes feeble. Even a dry and taut cord would not give a hunting arrow enough force to pierce a shield, and it was a rare strike that drove through mail, but a hail of arrows forced men to keep their faces down beneath their shield rims.

  “So what do we do, lord?” Svart asked.

  “Dawn, tomorrow,” Sigtryggr sounded anything but enthusiastic. “We’ll attack across the ditches,” he had stressed the “we,” meaning that his own household warriors would make that attack. “But we don’t push it too hard. We’re trying to make them think that’s our main assault. You,” he had edged back from the skyline and was looking at Sihtric who had brought sixty-two warriors from Dunholm, “you’ll be on our right. You and your men are there to stop them outflanking us with horsemen, and you, Father-in-law,” he looked at me, “will be on the left, doing the same thing.”

  “Stopping horsemen?”

  “And slowly getting closer to the northern corner.” He paused, as if expecting me to say something, but I just nodded. “And when you think the moment’s right,” he went on.

  “We attack.” I finished the phrase for him.

  “You attack the northern corner.” He sounded anything but confident, and I knew he was tempted to withdraw, to leave Sköll in his fortress and march south in hope of finding a better place to fight. “Damn the rain,” he said, as he slid back from the skyline.

  The rain not only enfeebled bowstrings, it made sword hilts slippery, it made shields heavier, it seeped beneath our mail so we were chilled and the leather liners chafed. It was the same for the enemy, of course, but that night our enemy was in shelter, with fires, listening to the rain pelt on the roof. They slept while we suffered and prayed.

  “Prayed, lord?” the poet-priest asked me eagerly.

  “We were horribly vulnerable there,” I explained. “We were in a deep valley, and Sköll could have led his men out and attacked us from the heights. He didn’t. He left us alone.” I paused, remembering. “It was a risk, but the Norse don’t like fighting at night. They never have.”

  “But you prayed,” Father Selwyn insisted.

  I saw what he was suggesting. “Of course we prayed,” I said, “but to Freyr, not to your god.”

  “Ah,” he reddened. “Freyr?”

  “He’s the god of weather,” I explained, “the son of Njörðr, the sea-god. Doesn’t your religion have a god of weather?”

  “There is only the one god, lord,” he was too nervous to see I was teasing him. “One god, lord, to govern everything.”

  “No wonder it rains so much, but Freyr answered our prayers.”

  “He did, lord?”

  “The rain stopped overnight and the wind went into the south.”

  “South, lord?” He understood that the rain ending was good news, but could not see the significance of the wind backing.

  “What happens when a warmer wind blows over wet land?” I asked.

  He gazed at me for a heartbeat. “Fog, lord?”

  Fog. The dawn brought a dense fog that shrouded the hills, and it was in that fog that men hefted the shields that had served as pillows, loosened swords in damp scabbards, drank ale, and stamped warmth into wet feet. We marched before sunrise, or at least we moved away from the place we had spent the night, filing up and around the hill, seeing nothing that was farther than twenty or thirty paces away. We startled a deer that bounded away down the slope, and I tried to find the omen in that sudden flight.

  Fog, thicker than any smoke in the hall, wrapped about us and we hoped it deadened the sounds we made because, though we had ordered our troops to be silent, the gray light was filled with scabbards banging on shields, footfalls, the curses of men tripping, and the tearing of grass and heather. Yet the gods loved us that morning because somehow we did not get lost on the hill. Eadric, with his poacher’s skill, led us, but it took time, so much time, to make the short journey uphill. At first we followed the remnants of a Roman road, but as we neared the fort we turned left, making for the gentler slope above Sköll’s ramparts. I had hoped, like Sigtryggr, to make the assault in the half darkness, but the sun was glowing through the eastern fog by the time we were in place. Shapes shifted in the fog, the fog itself drifted, and I had a glimpse of a wall and of spearmen lining the rampart. Our silence had been wasted, because the enemy was awake and ready for us. They would have woken anyway as Sigtryggr and Svart began shouting at their men to make a shield wall, and the enemy, hearing the orders, began to bellow insults. An arrow flew from the fortress to bury itself in the turf, well short of any man.

  “Bebbanburg!” I shouted, not as a challenge, but to rally my men. Finan and my son echoed the shout, and slowly my warriors appeared from the fog.

  “Shield wall!” Finan bellowed. “Here!” He was standing to the left of Sigtryggr’s men, who were still making their own wall as stragglers came from the wind-stirred fog.

  “Move! Move! Move!” my son was yelling. Some of Sigtryggr’s warriors joined my men by mistake and there was confusion as they left to find their own ranks. The fog was thinning. I had climbed a small hummock to see over the shambles of our half-formed shield wall and could see helmeted men watching us from Heahburh’s wall. They were watching and jeering, telling us we were all doomed men.

  Rorik brought my standard. “Plant it here, boy,” I told him, “and—”

  “Stay out of the fight, lord?” he interrupted me.

  “Stay out of the fight,” I said, helping him thrust the banner’s staff into the hummock’s turf. “And if it all goes wrong,” I added, “you run like the wind.” Why did I tell him that? I think even at that moment as the fog thickened again and as Sköll’s men jeered us I knew we had made the wrong choice. We should have fought Sköll anywhere except at this high place where he had wanted us to fight him.

  “End of the wall here! Here!” That was Berg. Somehow he had managed to bring his precious eagle flag as well as a shield and a spear, and he rammed the flag’s staff into the turf to mark the northernmost end of our shield wall. “Line up on me!” he shouted. “Here!” He spread his banner to make himself more visible. “Here!” He was facing us, and a sudden shift in the fog revealed Sköll’s men beyond him, beyond him and near to him, much too near, men who had left the fort to attack us before our shield wall was formed, gray-helmeted men with snarling wolves on their shields, warriors who came howling from the gray fog.

  And Berg had not even drawn his sword.

  Then was the clashing of shields. The sea-wolves came,

  Furious to the fight. The spear often pierced

  The life-house of the doomed . . . They stood fast,

  Warriors in combat, warriors falling

  Weary with wounds. The dead fell on the earth.

  I read Father Selwyn’s lines and flinched as I remembered that sudden attack from the morning fog. “I suppose we did stand fast,” I told the poet, “eventually.”
/>   “Eventually, lord?”

  “They surprised us,” I said, “in that fog we were supposed to surprise them, but they surprised us. We weren’t ready. What saved us was that Sköll didn’t send enough men. I don’t think there were more than sixty. He should have sent two hundred.”

  “And they were, what is the word, lord? Úlf—”

  “Úlfhéðnar,” I said, “but no, these men weren’t crazed, but you’re right, they came furious to the fight.”

  Sköll’s men might not have been crazed by henbane, but they still came like wolves, howling, they came to kill, and in that first moment I lost eight men. I blame myself. If you lead men and women then your success is their success, but the failures are all yours. All mine.

  I remember the leaping enemy, mouths open, shields held to one side so they could stab with spear or sword. Cerdic, big and loyal, but always slow, was the first of my men to die. He had been going to join Berg and I saw him turn in surprise, he did not even have time to resist and a Norseman’s spear went clear through his body, so hard was that opening thrust. I saw the mail at Cerdic’s back bulge, then the spearhead tore through and a second Norseman slashed his sword across Cerdic’s face and the blood was bright in that gray morning. The enemy was yelling, triumphant. Wulfmaer, another Saxon, was behind Cerdic. He had been one of my cousin’s warriors who had sworn his loyalty to me and I watched him die. He had time to raise his spear, level it, even begin to charge against the mass of men hurling themselves toward us, but he was jarred back by a spear thrust to his shield, he half turned, lunged his own weapon, and a Norseman’s sword knocked it aside and another man drove an ax down through Wulfmaer’s helmet and split his skull like a log.

  I ran forward, Serpent-Breath drawn, then Finan slammed into me from my right, stopping me. “To me! To me!” he shouted. The gods only know how fast he must have moved because only a moment before he had been yards away from me. “To me! Shields!” He knocked his shield against mine. “Raise it!” he snarled at me. I confess I was in a daze, appalled by the sudden onslaught. Someone, it turned out to be Beornoth, stood to my left. Sköll’s Norsemen were twenty paces away. Berg had vanished. Kettil, another of my Norsemen, had been following Wulfmaer, probably teasing him, now he whirled, sword drawn, and bellowed defiance. A Norseman charged him, spear leveled, Kettil danced clear, slashed once and the enemy reeled away, blood streaming from his face. “Come back!” Finan shouted, and Kettil tried, but two men trapped him, drove him a pace backward, Kettil lunged forward, his sword pierced a man’s belly and was trapped there and I shouted in futile anger as another warrior’s sword ripped across Kettil’s throat. Kettil had been a fine swordsman, a man who loved embroidered clothes, a vain man, but one whose jests could fill a hall with laughter. More men were joining our shield wall, I could hear the clatter of willow boards touching as we made the wall, but ahead of us men were still dying. Godric, who had been my servant, was pinned to the earth by a spear through the belly. He screamed like a child. Eadwold, surly and slow, tried to run, and was tripped by a spear. He screamed too. Thurstan, a devout Christian, who would earnestly tell me my soul was in danger, killed a Norseman with a massive spear thrust and was still thrusting and shouting as two swords sent his soul to heaven. He had a wife in Bebbanburg and a son in Eoferwic who was studying to become a priest. Then Cenwulf, a reliable man, honest and patient, had his belly opened by an ax. He moaned as he fell, trying desperately to cling to his sword as his guts spilled and he collapsed onto the blood-soaked turf. He was a Christian too, but like so many others he wanted to die with his weapon in his hand.