Arngrim raised his shield above his head. ‘To me! To me!’ Ordgar and others near him came together and held up their shields. Arngrim could hear the screams of more men falling, and heard a steady hail on the shields, as arrows and spears buried themselves in the wood.

And now he heard the whip of bow-strings, the hiss of arrows as the English bowmen replied.

‘They are coming!’ somebody cried. ‘The Danes!’

Arngrim held up his shield, risking a glimpse down the hill. The Danes were marching steadily up the slope, their shields locked: it was their wall, their skjaldborg, the shield-fort. They moved without a sound, without a cry or a drumbeat, save for the thud of their footsteps on the ground. Some fell to the English arrows, but the rest came on without flinching.

Arngrim cried, ‘Make the wall!’ The call was echoed by others, up and down the English line. ‘Shield wall! Make the wall!’

The front line held their shields before their bodies and overlapped them, locking them together, each man braced against the next. This exposed them to the deadly hail from the sky, but they had rehearsed for this, and the line behind pushed forward, sharing the cover of their shields with the front rank. To be in the middle of it was close, hot, intimate, with each man pressed up against the next. Arngrim felt the heavy mass of the bodies of the men behind, the anxious breath of a nervous warrior on his neck, and the stench of sweat and piss.

As they closed the Danes suddenly ran at the English. They clattered their swords against their shields, and roared, the noise overpowering. In their helmets and mail they might have been mirror-images of the English. And as they covered the last few paces Arngrim could see individual faces, pale and strong, broken into grins as they hurled abuse. Amgrim clasped his sword and roared defiance.

The walls clashed with a slam of wood and iron.

The Danes, running, had the momentum, and Arngrim staggered back. He was surrounded by a mass of hot, struggling bodies, the English at his back, the Danes before him, their faces not an arm’s length away from his own. There was no space to stand back, no room to take Ironsides from its scabbard on his back. He had to make his own space by shoving forward with the shield strapped to his left arm, so he could stab with the short sword in his right.

His first thrust was into the open mouth of a Dane. His war scream turned to bloody gurgles as Arngrim dragged his sword out of his wrecked throat. Another took his place, but Arngrim was able to sweep him aside with a slap of his blade. But another took his place and Arngrim hammered at his smooth young face as if his sword were a club.