Death of Kings_ A Novel - Bernard Cornwell [144]
‘If you want to fart,’ I shouted back, ‘go to your own side and stink them out.’
‘We’ll rape your wives,’ the man called. He spoke in English. ‘We’ll rape your daughters!’
I was happy enough that he should call such hopes, for they would only encourage my men to fight. ‘What was your mother?’ a Centishman called back. ‘A sow?’
‘If you lay your weapons down,’ the man shouted, ‘then we shall spare you!’ He turned his horse and I recognised him. He was Oscytel, Eohric’s commander, the brutal-looking warrior I had met on Lundene’s wall.
‘Oscytel!’ I shouted.
‘I hear a lamb bleating!’ he called back.
‘Get off your horse,’ I said, taking a step forward, ‘and fight me.’
He rested his hands on his saddle’s pommel and stared at me, then he glanced at the flooded ditch that had sheets of thin ice crusting its water. I knew that was why he had come, not just to insult, but to see what obstacle faced the Danish charge. He looked back to me and grinned. ‘I don’t fight old men,’ he said.
That was strange. No one had ever called me old before. I remember laughing, but there was shock behind my laughter. Weeks before, talking with Æthelflaed, I had mocked her because she was staring at her face in a great silver platter. She was worried because she had lines about her eyes and she had responded to my mockery by thrusting the plate at me, and I had looked at my reflection and seen that my beard was grey. I remember staring at it as she laughed at me, and I did not feel old even though my wounded leg could be treacherously stiff. Was that how people saw me? As an old man? Yet I was forty-five years old that year, so yes, I was an old man. ‘This old man will slit you from the balls to the throat,’ I called to Oscytel.
‘This day Uhtred dies!’ he shouted at my men. ‘And you all die with him!’ With that he circled his horse and spurred back towards the Danish shield wall. Those shields were eighty paces away now. Close enough to see men’s faces, to see the snarls. I could see Jarl Sigurd, magnificent in mail and with a black bear’s pelt humped from his shoulders. His helmet was crested with a raven’s wing, black in the dawn’s grey light. I could see Cnut, the man with the quick sword, his cloak white, his thin face pale, his banner the broken Christian cross. Sigebriht was beside Eohric, who in turn was flanked by Æthelwold, and with them were their fiercest, strongest warriors, the men who had to keep the kings and the jarls and lords alive. Warriors were touching crosses or hammers. They were shouting, but what they bellowed I could not tell because the world seemed silent in that moment. I was watching the enemy ahead, judging which one would come to kill me and how I would kill him first.
My banner was behind me and that banner would attract ambitious men. They wanted my skull as a drinking cup, my name as a trophy. They watched me as I watched them and they saw a man covered in mud, but a warlord with a wolf-crested helmet and arm rings of gold and with close-linked mail and a cloak of darkest blue hemmed with golden threads and a sword that was famous throughout Britain. Serpent-Breath was famous, but I sheathed her anyway, because a long blade is no help in the shield wall’s embrace, and instead I drew Wasp-Sting, short and lethal. I kissed her blade then bellowed my challenge at the winter wind. ‘Come and kill me! Come and kill me!’
And they came.
The spears came first, launched by men in the third or fourth enemy ranks, and we took them on our shields, the blades thumping hard into the willow, and the Danes were screaming as they rushed us.