That’ll bring the Danes like a swarm of bees.’
‘Stinging bees,’ a voice said from the dark.
‘You’re frightened?’ I asked scornfully. ‘They’re frightened! Their auguries are bad, they think they’re going to lose and the last thing they want is to face men of Defnascir in a grey dawn. We’ll make them scream like women, we’ll kill them, and we’ll send them to their Danish hell.’ That was the extent of my battle speech. I should have talked more, but I was nervous because I had to go down the hill first, first and alone. I had to live my childhood dream of shadow-walking, and Leofric and Edor would not lead the hundred men down to the river until they saw the Danes go to rescue their ships, and if I could not touch fire to the ships then there would be no attack and Odda’s fears would come back and the Danes would win and Wessex would die and there would be no more England. ‘So rest now,’ I finished lamely. ‘It will be three or four hours till dawn.’
I went back to the rampart and Father Willibald joined me there, holding out his crucifix that had been carved from an ox’s thigh bone. ‘You want God’s blessing?’ he asked me.
‘What I want, father,’ I said, ‘is your cloak.’ He had a fine woollen cloak, hooded and dyed a dark brown. He gave it me and I tied the cords around my neck, hiding the sheen of my mail coat. ‘And in the dawn, father,’ I said, ‘I want you to stay up here. The riverbank will be no place for priests.’
‘If men die there,’ he said, ‘then it is my place.’
‘You want to go to heaven in the morning?’
‘No.’
‘Then stay here,’ I spoke more savagely than I intended, but that was nervousness, and then it was time to go for, though the night was still dark and the dawn a long way off, I needed time to slink through the Danish lines. Leofric saw me off, walking with me to the northern flank of Cynuit that was in mooncast shadow. It was also the least guarded side of the hill, for the northern slope led to nothing except marshes and the Sæfern sea. I gave Leofric my shield. ‘I don’t need it,’ I said. ‘It will just make me clumsy.’
He touched my arm. ‘You’re a cocky bastard, Earsling, aren’t you?’
‘Is that a fault?’
‘No, lord,’ he said, and that last word was high praise. ‘God go with you,’ he added, ‘whichever god it is.’
I touched Thor’s hammer, then tucked it under my mail. ‘Bring the men fast when you see the Danes go to the ships,’ I said.
‘We’ll come fast,’ he promised me, ‘if the marsh lets us.’
I had seen Danes cross the marsh in the daylight and had noted that it was soft ground, but not rank bog-land. ‘You can cross it fast,’ I said, then pulled the cloak’s hood over my helmet. ‘Time to go,’ I said.
Leofric said nothing and I dropped down from the rampart into the shallow ditch. So now I would become what I had always wanted to be, a Shadow-Walker. Childhood’s dream had become life and death, and touching Serpent-Breath’s hilt for luck, I crossed the ditch’s lip. I went at a crouch, and halfway down the hill I dropped to my belly and slithered like a serpent, black against the grass, inching my way towards a space between two dying fires.
The Danes were sleeping, or close to sleep. I could see them sitting by the dying fires, and once I was out of the hill’s shadow there was enough moonlight to reveal me and there was no cover for the meadow had been cropped by sheep, but I moved like a ghost, a belly-crawling ghost, inching my way, making no noise, a shadow on the grass, and all they had to do was look, or walk between the fires, but they heard nothing, suspected nothing and so saw nothing. It took an age, but I slipped through them, never going closer to an enemy than twenty paces, and once past them I was in the marsh and there the tussocks offered shadow and I could move faster, wriggling through slime and shallow water, and the only scare came when I startled a bird from its nest and it leaped into the air with a cry of alarm and a swift whirr of wings. I sensed the Danes staring towards the marsh, but I was motionless, black and unmoving in the broken shadow, and after a while there was only silence. I waited, water seeping through my mail, and I prayed to Hoder, blind son of Odin and god of the night. Look after me, I prayed, and I wished I had made a sacrifice to Hoder, but I had not, and I thought that Ealdwulf would be looking down at me and I vowed to make him proud. I was doing what he had always wanted me to do, carrying Serpent-Breath against the Danes.
I worked my way eastwards, behind the sentries, going to where the ships were beached. No grey showed in the eastern sky. I still went slowly, staying on my belly, going slowly enough for the fears to work on me. I was aware of a muscle quivering in my right thigh, of a thirst that could not be quenched, of a sourness in the bowels. I kept touching Serpent-Breath’s hilt, remembering the charms that Ealdwulf and Brida had worked on the blade. Never, Ravn had said, never fight Ubba.
The east was still dark. I crept on, close to the sea now so I could gaze up the wide Sæfern and see nothing except the shimmer of the sinking moon on the rippled water that looked like a sheet of hammered silver. The tide was flooding, the muddy shore narrowing as the sea rose. There would be salmon in the Pedredan, I thought, salmon swimming with the tide, going back to the sea, and I touched the sword hilt for I was close to the strip of firm land where the hovels stood and the ship-guards waited. My thigh shivered. I felt sick.
But blind Hoder was watching over me. The ship-guards were no more alert than their comrades at the hill’s foot, and why should they be? They were further from Odda’s forces, and they expected no trouble, indeed they were there only because the Danes never left their ships unguarded, and these ship-guards had mostly gone into the fishermen’s hovels to sleep, leaving just a handful of men sitting by the small fires. Those men were motionless, probably half asleep, though one was pacing up and down beneath the high prows of the beached ships.
I stood.
I had shadow-walked, but now I was on Danish ground, behind their sentries, and I undid the cloak’s cords, took it off and wiped the mud from my mail and then walked openly towards the ships, my boots squelching in the last yards of marshland, and then I just stood by the northernmost boat, threw my helmet down in the shadow of the ship, and waited for the one Dane who was on his feet to discover me.
And what would he see? A man in mail, a lord, a shipmaster, a Dane, and I leaned on the ship’s prow and stared up at the stars. My heart thumped, my thigh quivered, and I thought that if I died this morning at least I would be with Ragnar again. I would be with him in Valhalla’s hall of the dead, except some men believed that those who did not die in battle went instead to Niflheim, that dreadful cold hell of the Northmen where the corpse goddess Hel stalks through the mists and the serpent Corpse-Ripper slithers across the frost to gnaw the dead, but surely, I thought, a man who died in a hall-burning would go to Valhalla, not to grey Niflheim? Surely Ragnar was with Odin, and then I heard the Dane’s footsteps and I glanced at him with a smile. ‘A chill morning,’ I said.
‘It is.’ He was an older man with a grizzled beard and he was plainly puzzled by my sudden appearance, but he was not suspicious.
‘All quiet,’ I said, jerking my head to the north to suggest I had been visiting the sentries on the Sæfern’s side of the hill.
‘They’re frightened of us,’ he said.
‘So they should be.’ I faked a huge yawn, then pushed myself away from the ship and walked a couple of paces north as though I was stretching tired limbs, then pretended to notice my helmet at the water’s edge. ‘What’s that?’
