The Pale Horseman (48 page)

'You're bleeding,' Ragnar said. I had taken a spear blade in the back of my right thigh. I
have the scar to this day.

Pyrlig cut a strip of cloth from a dead man's jerkin and used it to bind Ragnar's hand. He
wanted to bandage my thigh, but the bleeding had lessened and I managed to stand, though the
pain, which I had not felt ever since the wound had been given, suddenly struck me. I touched
Thor's hammer. We had won.

'They killed my woman,' I told Ragnar.

He said nothing, but just stood beside me and, because my thigh was agony and I suddenly
felt weak, I put an arm about his shoulders.

'Iseult, she was called,' I said, 'and my son is dead too.' I was glad it was raining or else
the tears on my face would have shown.

'Where's Brida?'

'I sent her down the hill,' Ragnar told me. We were limping together towards the fort's
northern ramparts.

'And you stayed?'

'Someone had to stay as a rearguard,' he said bleakly. I think he was crying too, because
of the shame of the defeat. It was a battle Guthrum' could not lose, yet he had.

Pyrlig and Steapa were still with me, and I could see Eadric stripping a dead Dane of his
mail, but there was no sign of Leofric. I asked Pyrlig where he was, and Pyrlig gave me a pained
look and shook his head.

'Dead?' I asked.

'An axe,' he said, 'in the spine.' I was numb, too numb to speak, for it did not seem
possible that the indestructible Leofric was dead, but he was, and I wished I could give
him a Danish funeral, a firefuneral, so that the smoke of his corpse would rise to the
halls of the gods. 'I'm sorry,' Pyrlig said.

'The price of Wessex,' I said, and then we climbed the northern ramparts, that were
crowded with Alfred's soldiers.

The rain was lessening, though it still fell in great swathes across the plain below. It
was as if we stood on the rim of the world, and ahead of us was an immensity of cloud and
rain, while beneath us, on the long steep slope, hundreds of Danes scrambled to the foot of
the escarpment where their horses had been left.

'Guthrum,' Ragnar said bitterly. 'He lives!'

'He was the first to run,' he said. 'Svein told him we should fight outside the walls,' he
went on, 'but Guthrum feared defeat more than he ever wanted victory.'

A cheer sounded as Alfred's banners were carried across the captured fort to the
northern ramparts. Alfred, mounted again, and with a bronze circlet about his helmet, rode
with the flags Beocca was on his knees giving thanks, while Alfred had a dazed smile and a
look of disbelief, and I swear he wept as his standards were rammed into the turf at the
world's edge. The dragon and the cross flew above his kingdom that had almost been lost, but
had been saved so that there was still one Saxon King in England.

But Leofric was dead and Iseult was a corpse and a hard rain fell across the land we had
rescued.

The End

The Westbury white horse is cut into the chalk of the escarpment beneath Bratton Camp on
the edge of the Wiltshire Downs. From the north it can be seen for miles, The present horse, a
handsome beast, is over a hundred feet long and almost two hundred feet high and was cut in
the 1770s, making it the oldest of Wiltshire's ten white horses, but local legend says that
it replaced a much older horse that was blazoned into the chalk hillside after the battle
of Ethandun in 878.

I should like to think that legend is true, but no historian can be certain of the
location of the battle of Ethandun, where Alfred met Guthrum's Danes, though Bratton Camp,
above the village of Edington, is the prime candidate. Bratton Camp is an Iron Age fortress
which still stands just above the Westbury white horse. John Peddie, in his useful book,
Alfred, Warrior King, places Ethandun at Bratton Camp, and Edgar's Stone at Kingston
Deverill in the Wylye valley, and I am persuaded by his reasoning.

There is no debate about the location of Æthelingaeg. That is now Athelney, in the
Somerset Levels, near Taunton, and if Bratton Camp is substantially unaltered since 878,
the levels are changed utterly. Today, mostly thanks to the, medieval monks who dyked and
drained the land, they make a wide, fertile plain, but in the ninth century they were a vast
swamp mingled with tidal flats, an almost impenetrable marsh into which Alfred retreated
after the disaster at Chippenham.

That disaster was the result of his generosity in agreeing the truce which allowed
Guthrum to leave Exeter and retreat to Gloucester in Danish-held Mercia. That truce was
secured by Danish hostages, but Guthrum, just as he had broken the truce arranged at Wareham
in 876, again proved untrustworthy and, immediately after Twelfth Night, attacked and
captured Chippenham, thus precipitating the greatest crisis of Alfred's long reign. The
king was defeated and most of his country taken by the Danes. Some great nobles, Wulfhere,
the Ealdorman of Wiltshire, among them, defected to the enemy, and Alfred's kingdom was
reduced to the watery wastes of the Somerset Levels. Yet in the spring, just four months
after the disaster at Chippenham, Alfred assembled an army, led it to Ethandun, and there
defeated Guthrum. All that happened. What, sadly, did not probably happen is the burning
of the cakes. That story, how a peasant woman struck Alfred after he allowed her cakes to
burn, is the most famous folk tale attached to Alfred, but its source is very late and thus
very unreliable.

Alfred, Ælswith, Wulfhere, Æthelwold and Brother (later Bishop) Asser all existed, as
did Guthrum. Svein is a fictional character. The great Danish enemies before Guthrum had
been the three Lothbrok brothers, and the defeat of the last of them at the battle of
Cynuit occurred while Alfred was at Athelney. For fictional reasons I moved that Saxon
victory forward a year, and it forms the ending of The Last Kingdom, the novel which
precedes The Pale Horseman, which meant I had to invent a character, Svein, and a skirmish,
the burning of Svein's ships, to replace Cynuit.

The two primary sources for Alfred's reign are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bishop
Asser's life of the king, and neither, alas, tells us much about how Alfred defeated Guthrum
at Ethandun. Both armies, by later standards, were small, and it is almost certain that
Guthrum considerably outnumbered Alfred. The West Saxon fyrd that won Ethandun. was
mostly drawn from Somerset, Wiltshire and western Hampshire, suggesting that all eastern
Wessex, and most of the north of the country, had been subdued by the Danes. We know the fyrd
of Devonshire was intact (it had won the victory at Cynuit, as was the fyrd of Dorset, yet
neither are mentioned as part of Alfred's army, suggesting that they were held back to
deter a seaborne attack. The lack of the fyrds from those two powerful shires, if indeed
they were absent, only confirms what a remarkable victory Alfred won.

The Saxons had been in Britain since the fifth century. By the ninth century they ruled
almost all of what is now England, but then the Danes came and the Saxon kingdoms crumbled.
The Last Kingdom tells of the defeat of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, and The Pale
Horseman describes how Wessex almost followed those northern neighbours into history's
oblivion. For a few months in early 878 the idea of England, its culture and language, were
reduced to a few square miles of swamp. One more defeat and there would probably never have
been a political entity called England. We might

have had a Daneland instead, and this novel would probably have been written in Danish.
Yet Alfred survived, he won, and that is why history awarded him the honorific 'the
Great'. His successors were to finish his work, they were to take back the three northern
kingdoms and so, for the first time, unite the Saxon lands into one kingdom called England,
but that work was begun by Alfred the Great.

Yet in 878, even after the victory at Ethandun, that must have seemed an impossible
dream. It is a long way from Ethandun's white horse to the bleak moors north of Hadrian's Wall,
so Uhtred and his companions must campaign again.

Bernard Cornwell