Usurper, page 9
Unferth swallowed bile as he drew his own blade. He glanced over his shoulder, seeing an encouraging nod from Redwald.
‘On the signal!’ Rothgar shouted.
The English host fell silent as word passed among them. They glanced to their centre, waiting expectantly, only yelling out again when Earl Edwin and Earl Morcar’s banners tipped forward, inclining toward the enemy. With a new blasting of horns and skirling of pipes, they tramped forward, in looser formation than they might have liked, though their marshals insisted on it for they were advancing uphill, and likely to come under missile attack. Almost immediately, javelins, stones and throwing axes darkened the sky before clattering down on helmets and shields.
Several men dropped, clutching gruesome wounds. Unferth’s own limewood was pierced through in front of his face by a bodkin-shaped spearhead, its weighted shaft soon proving an encumbrance. It took several strokes of his sword to cut it loose. Already, he realised, he was tiring, for the upward gradient was deceptive. Blood beat in his ears; sweat ran freely under his layers of linen, leather and mail. And all the while, the clamour rose. Up ahead, the Vikings hammered the earth with their spear butts, chanting ever more frenziedly.
Instinctively, the English closed ranks again, bearing through the deadly hail, gazes fixed on the eyes of the Northmen in their gargoyle helmets, on their bushy beards, their roaring red mouths.
‘Easy, lads, easy,’ Unferth heard his father rumble.
The gap narrowed. From forty yards, to thirty, to twenty.
The earth now shook; the air vibrated.
The shieldwalls were ten yards apart, when suddenly, as one, the Northmen’s roars reached a shuddering crescendo and they launched themselves downslope, a furious elemental wave. The collision resounded like thunder, a frightful din erupting as two storms of blades engaged each other, slashing, hacking, rending through wood, iron and flesh. Blood flew in spatters. The morning rang to the clangour of shields exploding, of spear-hafts splintering. Cries of rage became shrieks of agony.
Incredible though it was to Unferth’s eyes, the berzerkers literally leapt into battle, raised up on the shields of their comrades and springing over the heads of men like beasts, bellowing as they cleared the first line of their foes, bellowing even louder as they landed amid those behind, striking out on all sides. One wielded a smith’s hammer, and struck a housecarl’s helm such a blow that the metal imploded, the brains erupting through his faceplate. Another plied the infamous Dane-axe, and with a single two-handed swipe, sliced the thegn of Tollering’s head clean from his shoulders, only to die himself a moment later, Redwald’s sword thrust hilt-deep through his vitals.
Unferth’s own first contact came quicker than expected.
Directly in front of him, amid clouds of dust, Athelbere and his housecarls were already fighting like machines, axes rising and falling as they advanced over shattered shields and broken corpses. But a gap was appearing alongside them as the next company gave ground, a wedge of open space into which the opposition was suddenly aggressively pouring. Very quickly, that whole part of the English line found itself separate from the rest and manoeuvring toward the marsh, where all formation disintegrated, the shieldwall coming apart. Before Unferth knew it, he was driven along in a huge press of men, and then was floundering in the shallows, jostled from every side by open combat, warriors hewing at each other, or rolling and biting like rabid dogs, the waters around them turning scarlet. It was the last thing they wanted, for in one-to-one chaos the more battle-hardened Vikings would always have the upper hand.
Frantic, he looked landward, and saw the tall, rangy form of his father perched on drier ground, but swapping blows with two opponents at the same time, and already staggering with fatigue. Even as Unferth watched, an axe-blow split Rothgar’s shield. Shouting, the lad waded toward them, only for a Viking in steel-studded leather to come howling at him along the water’s edge. He was unhelmeted, his face brutally gashed, his hair a sopping mat of blood, but he came on apace and drove his two-handed spear at Unferth’s chest. The lad cut it aside and chopped him down, a backhand stroke across the side of his legs severing the right knee. The Viking slumped backward, gargling with pain. Unferth followed with a downward thrust, his sword ramming through the open mouth, a ruby fountain spurting as it sheared through bones and tissue at the back.
Fleetingly, the fact that he’d just killed his first man was incidental to the young Englishman, but as he spun around, his stomach lurched and vomit burst from his lips. Even so, he hobbled up onto dry ground, where his father had felled one of his opponents, but was struggling to fend off the other. This second one was of larger, heavier build, in addition to which Rothgar now was wounded, an axe-slash visible on the left shoulder of his hauberk. It couldn’t have been deep for he was still able to heft his shield, but that entire side of his body glinted red with gore.
‘Pagan dog!’ Unferth shouted, closing on the Viking from behind.
The fellow turned. This one was helmeted, but his aventail was made from cloth rather than chain, and Unferth’s sword clove through it, biting deep into the muscles and tendons of his neck. The fellow toppled sideways, dead before he hit the ground. Unferth grabbed his father by the wrist. Both were white and drenched with sweat, Rothgar’s helm dented and scarred, its nose-piece bent.
‘Our lines are broken,’ Unferth panted.
‘We can still beat them,’ the earl replied. ‘Where’s Athelbere?’
They looked around for the marshal of the house, and saw him straight away, though it was an unexpected sight. He was far up the corpse-strewn road in front of them, Wiglaf, their standard-bearer alongside him, as he and the Swaledale carls wrought savage execution on the Northmen, who now appeared to be falling back. Just beyond him, the housecarls of Morcar and Edwin were visible, also cleaving through the Viking hedge, scything men like sticks of wheat, while close at their backs came hordes of fyrdsmen with hammer, knife and boar-spear, clubbing and stabbing out the lives of the Norse wounded.
The chaos that had embroiled the left side of the English line had been fleeting. In the fury of that first assault, they’d splintered away from the main body of the army, but the centre and the right had held.
Father and son advanced. Any Northman they met, either upright and on guard or grovelling in his own bowels, they smote. When the earl found a new shield, he grabbed it. It was gouged and dripping with other men’s blood, but it was solid and hefty, and he beat his blade on it as they rejoined the fray. Athelbere bellowed a greeting as another Northman fell beneath his axe.
Unferth went in fiercely, driving his sword-tip through the broken links worn by a youthful Viking in front of him, impaling the chest, closing his ears to the shrill screams. He would leave his regrets until later, he told himself. All that mattered now was to live. But not just to live, to win. Because victory felt close. Their company continued to advance, stepping over more and more of the Viking slain, though as the gradient steepened, it became harder and heavier in their harness, and the enemy now was backing away rather than engaging. But not running, he noticed. With sudden alarm, it occurred to Unferth that this was too easy. And even as this thought struck him, he heard battle-horns sound anew, and a great, thundering crash as the retreating Northmen halted, reforming their shieldwall in a single movement. Though not in the centre, where an avenue cleared, and down it advanced a stupendous figure. With his brass-ringed coat, horned helmet and swirling cloak of white ‘faerie bear’ fur, it could only be Harald ‘the Hardraada’ Sigurdsson.
The Norse king was broad as an ox, and a full head taller than any man there. In one hand he wielded a broadsword, in the other a scramasaxe. At his heels came an entire pack of berzerkers, carrying Dane-axes and baying like wolves. But it was Sigurdsson who led the counter-charge. Unferth watched in awe as the giant figure threshed his way among the shields and spears of his foes, arms windmilling as he dashed out brains and sundered necks. Wulfnoth, one of his father’s strongest housecarls, attempted to engage the great warrior front-on, but he was bare-headed and bloody, and was promptly split to his teeth.
Behind their monarch, the entire Norse army surged.
Suddenly the press of shields from the front was irresistible. Unferth and Rothgar found themselves stumbling backward. A throwing spear hurtled past, glancing the side of Unferth’s helm, striking open his cheek, but travelling with such force that when it struck the lower belly of a housecarl behind him – Unferth saw that it was Gunwald, Letwold’s father – it pierced his ring-coat, plunging deep into his innards. Gunwald gave a protracted, tortured gasp as he doubled over.
‘On me!’ Unferth heard his father shout. The earl had grabbed Wiglaf by his shoulder harness and was lugging him back from the initial melee, but only so they could rally. ‘Swaledale… on me!’
Athelbere retreated to his master’s side, still swiping, laying Northmen left and right on a roadway slick with gore. Other carls joined them, Redwald chopping and cutting like a man possessed. Unferth went too. His body was numb with fatigue, his sword-arm aching, but the fight was on him. This was the only way. They formed a phalanx around the Blue Boar banner, hoping to stand firm as the Vikings flowed past. But axes rained blows upon them, hammers and darts smashed into the bulwark of their shields. The air now stank of sweat and guts and was riven by the most terrible dissonance, a hellish noise they could surely hear even in York. And still the invaders threw their might against them, Unferth stumbling and tripping as they were forced steadily back. He sensed the marsh again, now a morass of corpses as well as mud and reeds, but still capable of sucking an armoured man down should he venture too far into it.
‘Father, the fen!’ he tried to shout, but Earl Rothgar was distracted, and his son saw the reason.
Athelbere had broken formation to close with none other than Sigurdsson himself, the Viking ruler’s teeth bared in his immense white beard, his eyes burning like fiery jewels through the slits in his face-plate as he launched blow after colossal blow. Athelbere, perhaps the only man there who could stand against this monster, this troll of the sagas, parried them all, but tottered with exhaustion, while his opponent seemed tireless, inhuman. Rothgar tried to fight his way through to his champion’s side, only for a spear to strike the edge of his sword, deflect and catch him in the throat.
The earl stood stock-still, gagging, clawing at the wound.
‘Father!’ Unferth screamed, lurching toward him.
A Viking got in the way, so he slammed the iron boss of his shield, all that remained of it, into the grinning, filth-spotted face. Another came after the first, so he used the boss again, and then on the one after that, breaking noses and teeth, running each man through with his blade as they dropped. Just ahead, his father sank to one knee, head lolling, blood coursing through the fingers clamped on his throat.
A couple of yards beyond him, Athelbere fell.
A spear thrust from behind had skewered his back. He spasmed in response, opening his guard, and Sigurdsson weighed in, the scramasaxe shearing through the Englishman’s shoulder, burying itself deep in his trunk. Unferth slid to an astounded halt.
For a brief moment, time slowed down. The lad stood rigid, paralysed, watching as the greatest warrior in his father’s house, the swordmaster who’d taught him everything he knew, twisted to the ground, turning slowly in a crimson spray, the earth reverberating when he struck it.
Only laboriously, with monumental effort, did Unferth battle his way back to reality, blinking hot tears as he stumbled forward. His father was still upright at least, albeit sagging. But a Northman got to him before Unferth could, a Northman with a war-hammer. The two-handed swing to the earl’s temple would have shattered a giant’s skull, helmet or no. As Rothgar dropped, Unferth screamed his throat sore, smiting the Northman with a mighty blow of his own, slicing his gullet wide. He struck another behind him and another behind that one. His world now was a blood-drenched blur, a confusion of cries, shrieks and flickering, cavorting images of hatred and death. On one side, he saw Englishmen stricken in the marsh, overwhelmed by mail-clad beasts, trampled beneath stamping feet, pinned down with spears, drowning in mud, blood and offal. In the other direction, Edwald, Athelbere’s son, wept as he defended his father’s body, only for an axe to lop off his sword-hand at the wrist, and a seax to rip across his belly, his entrails boiling out.
Further into the field, the English shieldwall had fragmented, batches of the other earls’ housecarls standing like rocks, with waves of Northmen engulfing them, axes striking in shimmering, blood-wreathed patterns, smashing helms, cleaving faces.
Too dazed to make sense of it, Unferth thought he spied Morcar Aelfgarson, dappled crimson, mounted on a horse that someone had brought him, but ranging helplessly about, his shield in pieces, his sword broken. When a javelin flew at him from close quarters, the horseman ducked low to avoid it, and then galloped for his life, riding down friend and foe regardless. The javelin thrower was none other than Tostig Godwinson. Tostig the traitor, Tostig the devil, Tostig who had caused this carnage, now resplendent in gleaming ring-mail, his green livery and unscarred green shield embossed with the Golden Lion of Northumbria. It was as though he’d scarcely been involved up to now, though that didn’t surprise Unferth, for he’d many times heard his father say that Earl Tostig would fight to the last of his hearth-men before surrendering.
His father…
‘Father… Father, FATHER!’
Unferth yowled like a child, turning stiffly, sagging to his knees.
Rothgar lay motionless, the whole left side of his skull a crush of bone and metal. Other corpses, yet more of his slaughtered followers, were draped across him.
‘Father…’ More tears threatened, but suddenly Unferth’s eyes were too dry, too sore. There would be a time for weeping, but that time wasn’t now.
His gaze narrowed as it levelled on Tostig.
If nothing else, he would make that wastrel pay. He threw away the blood-slimed boss and hefted his sword. But before he could lurch forward, a mangled face swam into view, one eye-socket broken, the eyeball dislodged onto the cheek.
Wiglaf, the standard-bearer, was barely recognisable as he slumped against his overlord’s son, mucus and vomit slathering his beard. He couldn’t speak, yet even as he crumpled down he had strength enough to push into Unferth’s hands the wooden pole from the top of which the Blue Boar banner of Wulfbury still billowed.
‘Wiglaf? Wiglaf…’ the lad stammered. Again, he swayed where he stood. ‘Swaledale,’ he said in a hoarse whisper. Then louder, lustier: ‘SWALEDALE! TO ME!’ And he held the banner aloft.
But on all sides now, his household lay like butchered meat, limbs tangled, blood-streaked faces turned sightless to the sun.
‘Swaledale,’ he wept, his voice breaking. Just ahead, another wall of Viking shields came forward en masse, hacked, splintered, a forest of axes raised at their rear. ‘Swaledale!’
Lowering the banner till its spear-tip was level, Unferth Aelfricsson, new earl of Ripon, ran at his foes alone…
CHAPTER 10
The autumn evenings fell quickly in Swaledale, the steep hillsides casting deep and early shadows into the dale’s sheltered heart.
Cerdic stood alone on the palisade. Shreds of cloud were scattered across the ash-blue sky; underlit by the setting sun, they glowed like embers. Below him, lamps and candles flickered to life in Brackley-on-the-Water. The landscape, heated for so many weeks, exuded a comforting warmth. There was an odour of dust, wheat and sun-dried grass. But there was also, for the first time, a tang of autumn freshness. By late night it would be much cooler.
In only struck him how majestic a place Swaledale was now that it was under threat. For too long, Cerdic had taken these rich and verdant acres, this happy place that his father and forefathers had carved out of the northern wilderness, for granted. No one could look upon it, especially at moments like this, and attribute it to anything other than an all-powerful Creator. And not just that, a Creator with an eye for the exquisite. Of course, none of that meant it would be the Aelfricssons’ forever, or even that it would or should remain in its current tranquil, cultivated state. Cerdic hoped that it would. Even as he stood there, he prayed that it would, firstly to the Holy Virgin, whom he imagined would have greater empathy with all things peaceful and pastoral, and then to the saints, Basil and Walstan, who were known respectively for a love of all living things and an admiration of those who worked the land. Of course, Heaven was doubtless assailed by such entreaties from all corners on a daily basis.
Dear Lord, protect this place, preserve this loveliness…
Speaking of loveliness, movement in the valley caught his eye and, peering down, he spied a familiar figure pushing a two-handed cart out of Brackley, heading eastward along the valley road. Even from this distance and with the day dimming fast, the slender, golden-haired shape of Eadora was unmistakeable.
Cerdic’s boyish ardour had cooled a little since he’d seen her climbing so dexterously through the branches in Gonwyn’s Orchard, her brown, firm-muscled legs exposed to the thigh, his groin twitching, his stomach twitching, everything twitching, even his heart. Now, she seemed more like a figure of pity. Her brother was gone, at least for the moment. Unferth, who’d admitted that his feelings for her were more than purely sexual, had also gone. All her protectors had gone; she had to be hurting both physically and emotionally. The villagers likely thought less of her. Even those who believed she’d been raped would now consider her soiled goods. And still she was expected to carry out her heavy workload, with no assistance and no certainty for the future.
She hated Cerdic, of course. Her family were somewhat richer because of his folly, but it was doubtful that Eadora would see any of that. Even if she did, what had she to be grateful to him for? And yet, Cerdic had promised Unferth that he’d look out for her, do what he could to ease her burdens, though it would hardly be straightforward, which perhaps explained why thus far he hadn’t raised a finger on her behalf.
