shift tight across her breasts, then she saw my men beneath her and instinctively clutched her arms to her chest. She was clothed, but must have felt naked. ‘Oh, thank you dear Saviour for another sweet mercy,’ Pyrlig said, watching her.
‘But if we take the gate,’ Osferth said, worrying at the problems he saw, ‘the men left in the city will attack us.’
‘They will,’ I agreed.
‘And Sigefrid …’ he began.
‘Will probably turn back to slaughter us,’ I finished his sentence for him.
‘So?’ he said, then checked, because he saw nothing but blood and death in his future.
‘It all depends,’ I said, ‘on my cousin. If he comes to our aid then we should win. If he doesn’t?’ I shrugged, ‘then keep good hold of your sword.’
A roar sounded from Ludd’s Gate and I knew it had been swung open and that men were streaming down the road that led to the Fleot. Æthelred, if he was still readying his assault, would see them coming and have a choice to make. He could stand and fight in the new Saxon town, or else run. I hoped he would stand. I did not like him, but I never saw a lack of courage in him. I did see a great deal of stupidity, which suggested he would probably welcome a fight.
It took a long time for Sigefrid’s men to get through the gate. I watched from the shadows at the courtyard’s entrance and reckoned at least four hundred men were leaving the city. Æthelred had over three hundred good troops, most of them from Alfred’s household, but the rest of his force was from the fyrd and would never stand against a hard, savage attack. The advantage lay with Sigefrid whose men were warm, rested and fed, while Æthelred’s troops had stumbled through the night and would be tired.
‘The sooner we do it,’ I said to no one in particular, ‘the better.’
‘Go now, then?’ Pyrlig suggested.
‘We just walk to the gate!’ I shouted to my men. ‘You don’t run! Look as if you belong here!’
Which is what we did.
And so, with a stroll down a Lundene street, that bitter fight began.
There were no more than thirty men left at Ludd’s Gate. Some were sentries posted to guard the archway, but most were idlers who had climbed to the rampart to watch Sigefrid’s sally. A big man with one leg was climbing the uneven stone steps on his crutches. He stopped halfway and turned to watch our approach. ‘If you hurry, lord,’ he shouted to me, ‘you can join them!’
He called me lord because he saw a lord. He saw a warrior lord.
A handful of men could go to war as I did. They were chieftains, earls, kings, lords; the men who had killed enough other men to amass the fortune needed to buy mail, helmet and weapons. And not just any mail. My coat was of Frankish make and would cost a man more than the price of a warship. Sihtric had polished the metal with sand so that it shone like silver. The hem of the coat was at my knees and was hung with thirty-eight hammers of Thor; some made of bone, some of ivory, some of silver, but all had once hung about the necks of brave enemies I had killed in battle, and I wore the amulets so that when I came to the corpse-hall the former owners would know me, greet me and drink ale with me.
I wore a cloak of wool dyed black on which Gisela had embroidered a white lightning flash that ran from my neck to my heels. The cloak could be an encumbrance in battle, but I wore it now, for it made me look larger, and I was already taller and broader than most men. Thor’s hammer hung at my neck, and that alone was a poor thing, a miserable amulet made of iron that rusted constantly, and all the scraping and cleaning had worn it thin and misshapen over the years, but I had taken that little iron hammer with my fists when I was a boy and I loved it. I wear it to this day.
My helmet was a glorious thing, polished to an eye-blinding shine, inlaid with silver and crested with a silver wolf’s head. The face-plates were decorated with silver spirals. That helmet alone told an enemy I was a man of substance. If a man killed me and took that helmet he would be instantly rich, but my enemies would rather have taken my arm rings, which, like the Danes, I wore over my mail sleeves. My rings were silver and gold, and there were so many that some had to be worn above my elbows. They spoke of men killed and wealth hoarded. My boots were of thick leather and had iron plates sewn around them to deflect the spear thrust that comes under the shield. The shield itself, rimmed with iron, was painted with a wolf’s head, my badge, and at my left hip hung Serpent-Breath and at my right Wasp-Sting, and I strode towards the gate with the sun rising behind me to throw my long shadow on the filth-strewn street.
I was a warlord in my glory, I had come to kill, and no one at the gate knew it.
They saw us coming, but assumed we were Danes. Most of the enemy were on the high rampart, but five were standing in the open gate and all were watching Sigefrid’s force that streamed down the brief steep slope to the Fleot. The Saxon settlement was not far beyond and I hoped Æthelred was still there. ‘Steapa,’ I called, still far enough from the gate so that no one there could hear me speak English, ‘take your men and kill those turds in the archway.’
Steapa’s skull face grinned. ‘You want me to close the gate?’ he asked.
‘Leave it open,’ I said. I wanted to lure Sigefrid back to prevent his hardened men getting among Æthelred’s fyrd, and if the gate were open Sigefrid would be more inclined to attack us.
The gate was built between two massive stone bastions, each with its own stairway and I remembered how, when I was a child, Father Beocca had once described the Christian heaven to me. It would have crystal stairs, he had claimed, and enthusiastically described a great flight of glassy steps climbing to a white-hung throne of gold where his god sat. Angels would surround that throne, each brighter than the sun, while the saints, as he had called the dead Christians, would cluster about the stairs and sing. It sounded dull then and still does. ‘In the next world,’ I told Pyrlig, ‘we will all be gods.’
He looked at me with surprise, wondering where that statement had come from. ‘We will be with God,’ he corrected me.
‘In your heaven, maybe,’ I said, ‘but not in mine.’
‘There is only one heaven, Lord Uhtred.’
‘Then let mine be that one heaven,’ I said, and I knew at that moment that my truth was the truth, and that Pyrlig, Alfred and all the other Christians were wrong. They were wrong. We did not go towards the light, we slid from it. We went to chaos. We went to death and to death’s heaven, and I began to shout as we drew nearer the enemy. ‘A heaven for men! A heaven for warriors! A heaven where swords shine! A heaven for brave men! A heaven of savagery! A heaven of corpse-gods! A heaven of death!’
They all stared at me, friend and enemy alike. They stared and they thought me mad, and perhaps I was mad as I climbed the right-hand stairway where the man on crutches gazed at me. I kicked one of his crutches away so that he fell. The crutch clattered down the stairs and one of my men booted it back to the ground. ‘Death’s heaven!’ I screamed, and every man on the rampart had his eyes on me and still they thought I was a friend because I shouted my weird war cry in Danish.
I smiled behind my twin face-plates, then drew Serpent-Breath. Beneath me, out of my sight, Steapa and his men had begun their killing.
Not ten minutes before I had been in a waking dream, and now the madness had come. I should have waited for my men to climb the stairs and form a shield wall, but some impulse drove me
