'Where's the king?' I asked.
'I threw him out of the ditch,' Pyrlig said.
‘Is he safe?'
'I told the priests to hold him down. Told them to hit him if he tried to go again.'
'One more attack,' I said. I did not want to make it. I did not want to clamber over the bodies in the ditch and try to climb that impossible wall, and I knew it was stupid, knew I would probably die if I went again, but we were warriors and warriors will not be beaten. It is reputation. It is pride. It is the madness of battle. I began beating Serpent-Breath against my half-broken shield, and other men took up the rhythm, and the Danes, so close, were inviting us to come and be killed, and I shouted that we were coming.
'God help us,' Steapa said.
'God help us,' Pyrlig echoed.
I did not want to go. I was frightened, but I feared being called a coward more than I feared the ramparts, and so I screamed at my men to slaughter the bastards, and then I ran. I jumped over the corpse's in the ditch, lost my footing on the far side, fell on my shield and rolled aside so that no Dane could plunge a spear into my unprotected back. I hauled myself up and my helmet had skewed in the fall so that the face-plate half blinded me, and I fumbled it straight with my sword hand as I began to climb and Steapa was there, and Pyrlig was with me, and I waited for the first hard Danish blow.
It did not come. I struggled up the bank, the shield over my head, and I expected the death blow, but there was silence and I lifted the shield and thought I must have died for all I saw was the rain-filled sky. The Danes had gone. One moment they had been sneering at us, calling us women and cowards, and boasting how they would slice open our bellies and feed our guts to the ravens, and now they were gone. I clambered to the top of the wall and saw a second ditch and second wall beyond, and the Danes were scrambling up that inner rampart and I supposed that they intended to make a defence there, but instead they vanished over its top and Pyrlig grabbed my arm and pulled me on. 'They're running!' he shouted, 'by God, the bastards are running!' He had to shout to make himself heard over the rain.
'On! On!' someone shouted, and we ran into the second flooded ditch and up over the undefended inner bank and I saw Osric's men, the fyrd of Wiltunscir that had been defeated in the opening moments of the fight, had managed to cross the fort's walls. We learned later that they had gone into the valley where the white horse lay dead, and in the blinding rain they had made it to the fort's eastern corner which, because Guthrum thought it unapproachable, was only lightly defended. The rampart was lower there, hardly more than a grassy ridge on the valley's slope, and they had flooded over the wall and so got behind the other defenders.
Who now ran. If they had stayed then they would have been slaughtered to a man, so they fled across the fort's wide interior, and some were slow to realise that the battle was lost and those we trapped. I just wanted to kill for Iseult's sake, and I put two fugitives down, hacking them with Serpent-Breath with such fury that she cut through mail, leather and flesh to bite as deep as an axe. I was screaming my anger, wanting more victims, but we were too many and the trapped Danes were too few.
The rain kept falling and the thunder bellowed as I looked about for enemies to kill, and then I saw one last group of them, back to back, fighting off a swarm of Saxons, and I ran towards them and suddenly saw their banner. The eagle's wing. It was Ragnar.
His men, outnumbered and overwhelmed, were dying.
'Let him live!' I shouted, 'let him live!' and three Saxons turned towards me and they saw my long hair and my arm rings bright on my mailed sleeves, and they must have thought I was a Dane for they ran at me, and I 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.