*
From across the north came thegns and ceorls, hearth troops and fyrdmen, with their spears and swords, axes and shields. With them came swineherds, field labourers, millers and stable hands, bearing hay forks and hoes and whatever other weapons they could lay their hands on. Fresh-faced striplings with barely a wisp of hair upon their chins and time-worn warriors like your husband.
In all my years I’ve never seen anything like it. It was something to behold. That was when we – when I – really began to believe again. And the more that came to join us, the stronger that belief grew.
How many? Hundreds, thousands. Too many to count. More than I’d ever seen gathered together in a single place, all under the ancient purple and yellow banner of Northumbria, the adopted standard of our last great hope, the last in a line that stretched back half a thousand years. To most of us, Eadgar was the rightful king, deprived of his crown first by silver-tongued Harold and then by the outlander, bastard-born Wilelm. Eadgar was the man we would set upon the throne to rule justly over us and bring an end to the years of tyranny.
*
‘But it didn’t happen,’ Oslac puts in, stifling a yawn. ‘We know that.’
‘Oh, am I boring you?’
‘I’d just rather you got on with it.’
‘And I will, if you’ll stop interrupting me. You wanted to hear my tale, didn’t you? Well, this is it, and I’ll tell it how I choose. No doubt you’d tell it a different way if you’d been there, but you weren’t. You know nothing.’
‘Enough,’ says Merewyn in that sharp tone of hers. ‘Both of you. Oslac, let him say what he has to.’
‘Yes, and listen well,’ Beorn adds. ‘Who knows? You might just learn something. Something you can use in one of your poems sometime. If we survive this.’
*
What is there to say, really?
Not long after we started south, we had word that the Danes had reached these shores and were raiding along the coast. As soon as we knew where they’d landed, Eadgar sent them envoys, hoping that some sort of settlement could be reached so that we and the Danes could direct our attacks against the enemy rather than each other. Those were nervous times. As it turned out, though, we needn’t have worried. The Danes were only too eager to accept the offer of an alliance, and it wasn’t long before we were welcoming them as brothers. Their leader, Jarl Osbjorn, met the ?theling, and there was much feasting and celebration and sharing of ale. We all sensed that this was the beginning of something great.
Not long afterwards we took Eoferwic, cutting down the enemy until the streets were slick with their blood and you could hardly move without tripping over the bodies of the fallen. Some survived and retreated inside their stronghold, where we couldn’t get at them, but they were few. For those of us who had been there during that first rising, it felt like redemption after all our struggles. It would be different this time, we promised ourselves. We wouldn’t be overcome so easily. We had numbers on our side now: more than ten thousand men, someone said, now that the Danes had joined us. We would take the fight to the enemy and, this time, we would win.
What we didn’t know was that fate was against us. There would be no great battle, no clash of shield walls, no sword song, none of that.
The enemy didn’t defeat us. They didn’t need to.
We defeated ourselves.