Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [218]
This was the famous blood-eagle – an arrangement of death that the Vikings thought amusing.
Osric was numb. He did not even feel the horror. Then they noticed him.
He walked slowly towards them. They did not move. It occurred to him that since he was a child, perhaps they would not hurt him. As he reached the centre of the little nave, he saw that on his left, the door was open and that, through the clearing mist, the sun was shining. He stepped towards it.
Almost lazily, one of the Vikings swung his axe.
The news of the death of Aelfwine and Osric did not reach the thane for some time.
For on the same day, an event of much greater significance was taking place at Sarum – an event that nearly changed the history of the island for ever.
The sudden attack of the Danes upon the kingdom of Wessex in January 878 took the Saxons completely by surprise. Never before had the marauders broken their camp at midwinter. But in 878, a few weeks after Christmas, part of the Mercian force led by the Danish King Guthrum, suddenly left their encampment in Mercian Gloucester and moved with lightning speed into Wessex, taking the fortified settlement of Chippenham at once. From there, huge raiding parties swept southward over the ridges and down the valley of the river Avon. There was no army to oppose them.
Wessex, after all, was still minting new silver coins for its king: the Vikings had not done with it yet.
At the thane’s farmstead at Avonsford, the evacuation was completed with speed. The messenger had arrived at the gallop from Earldorman Wulfhere with orders for the thane and his men to meet him at the dunes at Searobyrg at once.
Immediately Aelfwald sent his men scurrying about loading stores and valuables into wagons making sure that everything they could not carry had been well concealed. He despatched his two sons to supervise the evacuation of the village.
“And Port, has he been warned?” he demanded.
“He has already been told,” the messenger shouted. “Hurry your men.” And he turned his horse back towards the dune.
Within an hour, the entire settlement was on the move, riding or walking beside the four wagons from the farm and the village, which had been piled high. Two more carts followed, filled with armour and weaponry.
Earldorman Wulfhere was waiting with a group of horsemen at the dune. His big, blotched face surveyed the approaching carts with disgust, and he greeted Aelfwald with a curt nod.
“I didn’t say bring your whole village with you,” he said grumpily.
“Should I have left them to the Vikings?” the thane asked, to which Wulfhere only shrugged in reply. Other trails of carts were approaching from nearby hamlets.
Both men stared at the old earthwork fortress that was meant to defend the place.
“We can’t fight here,” the earldorman stated flatly. “No gate and the fortifications need repair.”
“We could improvise a gate,” Aelfwald suggested, but Wulfhere shook his head.
“The king’s ordered a general withdrawal anyway,” he said. “Back to the homelands west of Selwood.”
Even now, though the kingdom of Wessex stretched as far as London, it was the hinterland to the west of the huge barrier of Selwood forest, the original power base of the early west Saxon tribal group, which was still sometimes thought of as the homeland. There, west of the sweeping open ridges and broad valleys of Sarum, lay the remote fastnesses of marsh and woodland which the Vikings did not often try to penetrate.
Aelfwald was appalled.
“We’re deserting the whole south? Wilton too?”
Wulfhere looked at him a little strangely, then