will not fight in the shield wall,’ my father said.
‘No, father.’
‘Only men can stand in the shield wall,’ he said, ‘but you will watch, you will learn, and you will discover that the most dangerous stroke is not the sword or axe that you can see, but the one you cannot see, the blade that comes beneath the shields to bite your ankles.’
He grudgingly gave me much other advice as we followed the long road south. Of the two hundred and fifty men who went to Eoferwic from Bebbanburg, one hundred and twenty were on horseback. Those were my father’s household men or else the wealthier farmers, the ones who could afford some kind of armour and had shields and swords. Most of the men were not wealthy, but they were sworn to my father’s cause, and they marched with sickles, spears, reaping hooks, fish gaffs and axes. Some carried hunting bows, and all had been ordered to bring a week’s food which was mostly hard bread, harder cheese and smoked fish. Many were accompanied by women. My father had ordered that no women were to march south, but he did not send them back, reckoning that the women would follow anyway, and that men fought better when their wives or lovers were watching, and he was confident that those women would see the levy of Northumbria give the Danes a terrible slaughter. He claimed we were the hardest men of England, much harder than the soft Mercians. ‘Your mother was a Mercian,’ he added, but said nothing more. He never talked of her. I knew they had been married less than a year, that she had died giving birth to me, and that she was an Ealdorman’s daughter, but as far as my father was concerned she might never have existed. He claimed to despise the Mercians, but not as much as he scorned the coddled West Saxons. ‘They don’t know hardship in Wessex,’ he maintained, but he reserved his severest judgment for the East Anglians. ‘They live in marshes,’ he once told me, ‘and live like frogs.’ We Northumbrians had always hated the East Anglians for long ago they had defeated us in battle, killing Æthelfrith, our king and husband to the Bebba after whom our fortress was named. I was to discover later that the East Anglians had given horses and winter shelter to the Danes who had captured Eoferwic, so my father was right to despise them. They were treacherous frogs.
Father Beocca rode south with us. My father did not much like the priest, but did not want to go to war without a man of God to say prayers. Beocca, in turn, was devoted to my father who had freed him from slavery and provided him with his education. My father could have worshipped the devil and Beocca, I think, would have turned a blind eye. He was young, clean-shaven and extraordinarily ugly, with a fearful squint, a flattened nose, unruly red hair and a palsied left hand. He was also very clever, though I did not appreciate it then, resenting that he gave me lessons. The poor man had tried so hard to teach me letters, but I mocked his efforts, preferring to get a beating from my father to concentrating on the alphabet.
We followed the Roman road, crossing their great wall at the Tine, and still going south. The Romans, my father said, had been giants who built wondrous things, but they had gone back to Rome and the giants had died and now the only Romans left were priests, but the giants’ roads were still there and, as we went south, more men joined us until a horde marched on the moors either side of the stony road’s broken surface. The men slept in the open, though my father and his chief retainers would bed for the night in abbeys or barns.
We also straggled. Even at nine years old I noticed how we straggled. Men had brought liquor with them, or else they stole mead or ale from the villages we passed, and they frequently got drunk and simply collapsed at the roadside and no one seemed to care. ‘They’ll catch up,’ my father said carelessly.
‘It’s not good,’ Father Beocca told me.
‘What’s not good?’
‘There should be more discipline. I have read the Roman wars and know there must be discipline.’
‘They’ll catch up,’ I said, echoing my father.
That night we were joined by men from the place called Cetreht where, long ago, we had defeated the Welsh in a great battle. The newcomers sang of the battle, chanting how we had fed the ravens with the foreigners’ blood, and the words cheered my father who told me we were near Eoferwic and that next day we might expect to join Osbert and Ælla, and how the day after that we would feed the ravens again. We were sitting by a fire, one of hundreds of fires that stretched across the fields. South of us, far off across a flat land, I could see the sky glowing from the light of still more fires and knew they showed where the rest of Northumbria’s army gathered.
‘The raven is Woden’s creature, isn’t it?’ I asked nervously.
My father looked at me sourly. ‘Who told you that?’
I shrugged, said nothing.
‘Ealdwulf?’ He guessed, knowing that Bebbanburg’s blacksmith, who had stayed at the fortress with Ælfric, was a secret pagan.
‘I just heard it,’ I said, hoping I would get away with the evasion without being hit, ‘and I know we are descended from Woden.’
‘We are,’ my father acknowledged, ‘but we have a new God now.’ He stared balefully across the encampment where men were drinking. ‘Do you know who wins battles, boy?’
‘We do, father.’
‘The side that is least drunk,’ he said and then, after a pause, ‘but it helps to be drunk.’
‘Why?’
‘Because a shield wall is an awful place.’ He gazed into the fire. ‘I have been in six shield walls,’ he went on, ‘and prayed every time it would be the last. Your brother, now, he was a man who might have loved the shield wall. He had courage.’ He fell silent, thinking, then scowled. ‘The man who brought his head. I want his head. I want to spit into his dead eyes then put his skull on a pole above the Low Gate.’
‘You will have it,’ I said.
He sneered at that. ‘What do you know?’ he asked. ‘I brought you, boy, because you must see battle. Because our men must see that you are here. But you will not fight. You’re like a young dog who watches the old dogs kill the boar, but doesn’t bite. Watch and learn, watch and learn and maybe one day you’ll be useful. But for now you’re nothing but a pup.’ He dismissed me with a wave.
Next day the Roman road ran across a flat land, crossing dykes and ditches, until at last we came to where the combined armies of Osbert and Ælla had made their shelters. Beyond them, and just visible through the scattered trees, was Eoferwic, and that was where the Danes were.
Eoferwic was, and still is, the chief city of northern England. It possesses a great abbey, an archbishop, a fortress, high walls, and a vast market. It stands beside the River Ouse, and boasts a bridge, but ships can reach Eoferwic from the distant sea, and that was how the Danes had come. They must have known that Northumbria was weakened by civil war, that Osbert, the rightful king, had marched westwards to meet the forces of the pretender Ælla, and in the absence of the king they had taken the city. It would not have been difficult for them to have discovered Osbert’s absence. The trouble between Osbert and Ælla had been brewing for weeks, and Eoferwic was filled with traders, many from across the sea, who would have known of the two men’s bitter rivalry. One thing I learned about the Danes was that they knew how to spy. The monks who write the chronicles tell us that they came from nowhere, their dragon-prowed ships suddenly appearing from a blue vacancy, but it was rarely like that. The Viking crews might attack unexpectedly, but the big fleets, the war fleets, went where they knew there was already trouble. They found an existing wound and filled it like maggots.
My father took me close to the city, he and a score of his men, all of us mounted and all wearing mail or leather. We could see the enemy on the wall. Some of the wall was built of stone, that was the Roman work, but much of the city was protected by an earth wall, topped by a high wooden palisade, and to the east of the city part of that palisade was missing. It seemed to have been burned for we could see charred wood on top of the earthen wall where fresh stakes had been driven to hold the new palisade that would replace the burned fence.
Beyond the new stakes was a jumble of thatched roofs, the wooden bell towers of three