Conqueror

XVI

In the King's camp, priests prayed and women waited nervously.

This Monday in May was peaceful. The sun was warm on Cynewulf's face. In the churned-up mud of the camp's floor green grass shoots struggled to find air and light amid the prints of feet and hooves.

He could hear nothing of the battle. Somehow it seemed wrong that men should be slaughtering each other with so little noise; there ought to be a grander sound, a slamming like thunder, perhaps, and flashes in the sky.

At last his curiosity overcame his caution.

It wasn't hard to slip out of the camp. But he had gone only a dozen paces when Ibn Zuhr caught him up. 'Arngrim told me to keep an eye on you.'

'I don't trust you, Moor.'

'I don't trust you either. So we're even.'

Cynewulf eyed him. 'Come, then.'

Retracing his tracks from the day when he had gone spying with Arngrim, he made for the high ground from which they had watched the Danish camp.

From here Cynewulf could see the battle laid out as if on a diagram. There was the King's party – he thought he recognised Alfred himself, his jewelled crown a pinprick of colour, his dragon banner fluttering. Around him his reserve troops milled, most of them fyrd, a muddy, homogenous mass. On the other side of the killing field was a mirror-image party that must be Guthrum and his own companions.

And between these two poles of command was the battle front. All Cynewulf could make out was a compressed mass of hundreds of men, pressed together beneath glittering swords and axes. At the centre of the mob was a kind of bloody froth, a line of bright crimson, where the swords stabbed and the axes swung. Cynewulf was astonished by the brightness of the blood, the quantity of it, and the almost neat way limbs were severed and torsos sliced through.

Pagans were much drawn to boundary places, river banks and ocean surfaces, places where one world touched another. That clash of shield walls was just such a boundary place, a boundary between death and life, where breathing men were stabbed and hewn to lifeless pulp.

Ibn Zuhr was analytical, dismissive. 'Only a few hundred men on each side. This would have been no more than an incident in the great battles of the past. The Caesars brought armies of tens of thousands to this island. And there is no tactic but to press and thrust. A thousand years ago Alexander the Great used cavalry to-'

Cynewulf didn't know what cavalry was, and didn't care. 'Shut up,' he snarled.

The Moor seemed startled by the priest's anger. But he said, 'We have seen all we can see. We should go.'

Cynewulf couldn't bear to look at the man. But he nodded, and the two of them withdrew.