Bernard Cornwell - The Burning Land

‘I have nine hundred men here,’ he said, ‘and we have the burh’s garrison, and now your three hundred. Harald will break himself on these walls.’ I saw Æthelred, Æthelhelm and Ealdorman Æthelnoth of Sumorsæte all nod their agreement.

‘And I have five hundred men at Silcestre,’ Æthelred said, as though that made all the difference.

‘And what are they doing there?’ I asked, ‘pissing in the Temes while we fight?’

Æthelflæd grinned, while her brother Edward looked affronted. Dear Father Beocca, who had been my childhood tutor, gave me a long-suffering look of reproof. Alfred just sighed. ‘Lord Æthelred’s men can harry the enemy while they besiege us,’ he explained.

‘So our victory, lord,’ I said, ‘depends on Harald attacking us here? On Harald allowing us to kill his men while they try to cross the wall?’ Alfred did not answer. A pair of sparrows squabbled among the rafters. A thick beeswax candle on the altar behind Alfred guttered and smoked and a monk hurried to trim the wick. The flame grew again, its light reflected from a high golden reliquary that seemed to contain a withered hand.

‘Harald will want to defeat us.’ Edward made his first tentative contribution to the discussion.

‘Why?’ I asked, ‘when we’re doing our best to defeat ourselves?’ There was an aggrieved murmur from the courtiers, but I overrode it. ‘Let me tell you what Harald will do, lord,’ I said, speaking to Alfred. ‘He’ll take his army north of us and advance on Wintanceaster. There’s a lot of silver there, all conveniently piled in your new cathedral, and you’ve brought your army here so he won’t have much trouble breaking through Wintanceaster’s walls. And even if he does besiege us here,’ I spoke even louder to drown Bishop Asser’s angry protest, ‘all he needs do is surround us and let us starve. How much food do we have here?’

The king gestured to Asser, requesting that he stop spluttering. ‘So what would you do, Lord Uhtred?’ Alfred asked, and there was a plaintive note in his voice. He was old and he was tired and he was ill, and Harald’s invasion seemed to threaten all that he had achieved.

‘I would suggest, lord,’ I said, ‘that Lord Æthelred order his five hundred men to cross the Temes and march to Fearnhamme.’

A hound whined in a corner of the church, but otherwise there was no sound. They all stared at me, but I saw some faces brighten. They had been wallowing with indecision and had needed the sword stroke of certainty.

Alfred broke the silence. ‘Fearnhamme?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Fearnhamme,’ I repeated, watching Æthelred, but his pale face displayed no reaction, and no one else in the church made any comment.

I had been thinking about the country to the north of Æscengum. War is not just about men, nor even about supplies, it is also about the hills and valleys, the rivers and marshes, the places where land and water will help defeat an enemy. I had travelled through Fearnhamme often enough on my journeys from Lundene to Wintanceaster, and wherever I travelled I noted how the land lay and how it might be used if an enemy was near. ‘There’s a hill just north of the river at Fearnhamme,’ I said.

‘There is! I know it well,’ one of the monks standing to Alfred’s right said, ‘it has an earthwork.’

I looked at him, seeing a red-faced, hook-nosed man. ‘And who are you?’ I asked coldly.

‘Oslac, lord,’ he said, ‘the abbot here.’

‘The earthwork,’ I asked him, ‘is it in good repair?’

‘It was dug by the ancient folk,’ Abbot Oslac said, ‘and it’s much overgrown with grass, but the ditch is deep and the bank is still firm.’

There were many such earthworks in Britain, mute witnesses to the warfare that had rolled across the land before we Saxons came to bring still more. ‘The bank’s high enough to make defence easy?’ I asked the abbot.

‘You could hold it for ever, given enough men,’ Oslac said confidently. I gazed at him, noting the scar across the bridge of his nose. Abbot Oslac, I decided, had been a warrior before he became a monk.

‘But why invite Harald to besiege us there?’ Alfred asked, ‘when we have Æscengum and its walls and its storehouses?’

‘And how long will those storehouses last, lord?’ I asked him. ‘We have enough men inside these walls to hold the enemy till Judgement Day, but not enough food to reach Christmas.’ The burhs were not provisioned for a large army. The intent of the walled towns was to hold the enemy in check and allow the army of household warriors, the trained men, to attack the besiegers in the open country outside.

‘But Fearnhamme?’ Alfred asked.

‘Is where we shall destroy Harald,’ I said unhelpfully. I looked at Æthelred. ‘Order your men to Fearnhamme, cousin, and we’ll trap Harald there.’

There was a time when Alfred would have questioned and tested my ideas, but that day he looked too tired and too sick to argue, and he plainly did not have the patience to listen to other men challenging my plans. Besides, he had learned to trust me when it came to warfare, and I expected his assent to my vague proposal, but then he surprised me. He turned to the churchmen and gestured that one of them should join him, and Bishop Asser took the elbow of a young, stocky monk and guided him to the king’s chair. The monk had a hard, bony face and black tonsured hair as bristly and stiff as a badger’s pelt. He might have been handsome except his eyes were milky, and I guessed he had been blind from birth. He groped for the king’s chair, found it and knelt beside Alfred, who laid a fatherly hand on the monk’s bowed head. ‘So, Brother Godwin?’ he asked gently.

‘I am here, lord, I am here,’ Godwin said in a voice scarce above a hoarse whisper.

‘And you heard the Lord Uhtred?’

‘I heard, lord, I heard.’ Brother Godwin raised his blind eyes to the king. He said nothing for a while, but his face was twisting all that time, twisting and grimacing like a man possessed by an evil spirit. He started to utter a choking noise, and what astonished me was that none of this alarmed Alfred, who waited patiently until, at last, the young monk regained a normal expression. ‘It will be well, lord King,’ Godwin said, ‘it will be well.’

Alfred patted Brother Godwin’s head again and smiled at me. ‘We shall do as you suggest, Lord Uhtred,’ he said decisively. ‘You will direct your men to Fearnhamme,’ he spoke to Æthelred, then looked back to me, ‘and my son,’ he went on, ‘will command the West Saxon forces.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said dutifully. Edward, the youngest man in the church, looked embarrassed, and his eyes flicked nervously from me to his father.

‘And you,’ Alfred turned to look at his son, ‘will obey the Lord Uhtred.’

Æthelred could contain himself no longer. ‘What guarantees do we have,’ he asked petulantly, ‘that the heathens will go to Fearnhamme?’

‘Mine,’ I said harshly.

‘But you cannot be certain!’ Æthelred protested.

‘He will go to Fearnhamme,’ I said, ‘and he will die there.’

I was wrong about that.

Messengers rode to Æthelred’s men at Silcestre, ordering them to march on Fearnhamme at first light next morning. Once there they were to occupy the hill that stands just north of the river. Those five hundred men were the anvil, while the men at Æscengum were my hammer, but to lure Harald onto the anvil would mean dividing our forces, and it is a rule of war not to do that. We had, at my best estimate, about five hundred men fewer than the Danes, and by keeping our army in two parts I was inviting Harald to destroy them separately. ‘But I’m relying on Harald being an impulsive fool, lord,’ I told Alfred that night.