Cenwulf back to Fyrdraca with a message for Leofric, warning him to be ready to fight in the morning, and I thought perhaps Haesten and I should retreat to the ship, but the serving girls were pretty and so we stayed, and I need not have worried for no one tried to kill us in the night, and no one even tried when Haesten and I carried the first third of the silver down to the water’s edge where a small boat carried us to our ship. ‘There’s twice as much as that waiting for us,’ I told Leofric.
He stirred the sack of silver with his foot. ‘And where were you last night?’
‘In bed with a Briton.’
‘Earsling,’ he said. ‘So who are we fighting?’
‘A pack of savages.’
We left ten men as ship guards. If Peredur’s men made a real effort to capture Fyrdraca then those ten would have had a hard fight, and probably a losing fight, but they had the three hostages who may or may not have been Peredur’s sons, so that was a risk we had to take, and it seemed safe enough because Peredur had assembled his army on the eastern side of the town. I say army, though it was only forty men, and I brought thirty more, and my thirty were well armed and looked ferocious in their leather. Leofric, like me, wore mail, as did half a dozen of my crewmen, and I had my fine helmet with its face-plate so I, at least, looked like a lord of battles.
Peredur was in leather, and he had woven black horsetails into his hair and onto the twin forks of his beard so that the horsetails hung down wild and long and scary. His men were mostly armed with spears, though Peredur himself possessed a fine sword. Some of his men had shields and a few had helmets, and though I did not doubt their bravery I did not reckon them formidable. My crewmen were formidable. They had fought Danish ships off the Wessex coast and they had fought in the shield wall at Cynuit and I had no doubt that we could destroy whatever troops Callyn had placed in Dreyndynas.
It was afternoon before we climbed the hill. We should have gone in the morning, but some of Peredur’s men were recovering from their night’s drinking, and the women of his settlement kept pulling others away, not wanting them to die, and then Peredur and his advisers huddled and talked about how they should fight the battle, though what there was to talk about I did not know. Callyn’s men were in the fort, we were outside it, so we had to assault the bastards. Nothing clever, just an attack, but they talked for a long time, and Father Mardoc said a prayer, or rather he shouted it, and then I refused to advance because the rest of the silver had not been fetched.
It came, carried in a chest by two men, and so at last, under the afternoon sun, we climbed the eastern hill. Some women followed us, shrieking their battle-screams, which was a waste of breath because the enemy was still too far away to hear them.
‘So what do we do?’ Leofric asked me.
‘Form a wedge,’ I guessed. ‘Our best men in the front rank and you and me in front of them, then kill the bastards.’
He grimaced. ‘Have you ever assaulted one of the old people’s forts?’
‘Never.’
‘It can be hard,’ he warned me.
‘If it’s too hard,’ I said, ‘we’ll just kill Peredur and his men and take their silver anyway.’
Brother Asser, his neat black robes muddied about their skirts, hurried over to me. ‘Your men are Saxons!’ he said accusingly.
‘I hate monks,’ I snarled at him. ‘I hate them more than I hate priests. I like killing them. I like slitting their bellies. I like watching the bastards die. Now run off and die before I cut your throat.’
He ran off to Peredur with his news that we were Saxons. The king stared at us morosely. He had thought he had recruited a crew of Danish Vikings, and now he discovered we were West Saxons and he was not happy, so I drew Serpent-Breath and banged her blade against my limewood shield. ‘You want to fight this battle or not?’ I asked him through Asser.
Peredur decided he wanted to fight, or rather he wanted us to fight the battle for him, and so we slogged on up the hill which had a couple of false crests so it was well into the afternoon before we emerged onto the long, shallow summit and could see Dreyndynas’s green turf walls on the skyline. A banner flew there. It was a triangle of cloth, supported on its pole by a small cross-staff, and the banner showed a white horse prancing on a green field.
I stopped then. Peredur’s banner was a wolf’s tail hung from a pole, I carried none, though, like most Saxons, mine would have been a rectangular flag. I only knew one people who flew triangular banners and I turned on Brother Asser as he sweated up the hill. ‘They’re Danes,’ I accused him.
‘So?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you were a Dane, and all the world knows the Danes will fight anyone for silver, even other Danes. But are you frightened of them, Saxon?’
‘Your mother didn’t give birth to you,’ I told him, ‘but farted you out of her shrivelled arsehole.’
‘Frightened or not,’ Asser said, ‘you’ve taken Peredur’s silver, so you must fight them now.’
‘Say one more word, monk,’ I said, ‘and I’ll cut off your scrawny balls.’ I was gazing uphill, trying to estimate numbers. Everything had changed since I had seen the white horse banner because instead of fighting against half-armed British savages we would have to take on a crew of lethal Danes, but if I was surprised by that, then the Danes were equally surprised to see us. They were crowding Dreyndynas’s wall, which was made of earth fronted with a ditch and topped with a thorn fence. It would be a hard wall to attack, I thought, especially if it was defended by Danes. I counted over forty men on the skyline and knew there would be others I could not see, and the numbers alone told me this assault would fail. We could attack, and we might well get as far as the thorn palisade, but I doubted we could hack our way through, and the Danes would kill a score of us as we tried, and we would be lucky to retreat down the hill without greater loss.
‘We’re in a cesspit,’ Leofric said to me.
‘Up to our necks.’
‘So what do we do? Turn on them and take the money?’
I did not answer because the Danes had dragged a section of the thorn fence aside and three of them now jumped down from the ramparts and strolled towards us. They wanted to talk.
‘Who the hell is that?’ Leofric asked.
He was staring at the Danish leader. He was a huge man, big as Steapa Snotor, and dressed in a mail coat that had been polished with sand until it shone. His helmet, as highly polished as his mail, had a face-plate modelled as a boar’s mask with a squat, broad snout, and from the helmet’s crown there flew a white horsetail. He wore arm rings over his mail, rings of silver and gold that proclaimed him to be a warrior chief, a sword-Dane, a lord of war. He walked the hillside as if he owned it, and in truth, he did own it because he possessed the fort.
Asser hurried to meet the Danes, going with Peredur and two of his courtiers. I went after them and found Asser trying to convert the Danes. He told them that God had brought us and we would slaughter them all and their best course was to surrender now and yield their heathen souls to God. ‘We shall baptise you,’ Asser said, ‘and there will be much rejoicing in heaven.’
The Danish leader slowly pulled off his helmet and his face was almost as frightening as the boar-snouted mask. It was a broad face, hardened by sun and wind, with the blank, expressionless eyes of a killer.
