All that mattered was to clear the gate’s parapet. Wihtgar, with his Mercians, was savaging the enemy on the eastern side of the archway, and his sword, Flæscmangere, was as red as Finan’s Soul-Stealer. I ran back to the steps and saw that Rumwald’s men were thrusting the confused East Anglians away from the gate’s arch, but Brihtwulf, his stallion white-eyed and frightened, was still inside the closed gates. One locking bar had been freed from the iron brackets, but the second was high and heavy. ‘Hurry!’ I bellowed, and four men used spears to push the bar upwards. It fell with a crash, making Brihtwulf’s horse rear, then the huge gates were pushed outwards on squealing hinges. ‘Go!’ I called. ‘Go!’ And Brihtwulf kicked his heels and the stallion bolted across the bridge. The folk waiting outside scattered.

Rumwald had made a shield wall across the road. Behind it were bodies, some moving, most motionless in puddles of their blood. Father Oda was shouting at the East Anglians, telling them their war was over, that God Almighty had sent King Æthelstan to bring peace and plenty. I let him harangue them and went back to the parapet where terrified West Saxons, relieved of their weapons, were being forced to jump off the high bastion into the filth of the flooded ditch. ‘The shit will kill them if they don’t drown,’ Finan said.

‘We have to barricade the parapet,’ I said, ‘both ways.’

‘We will,’ Finan said.

We had taken the twin bastions and the arch’s fighting platform between them, and Rumwald’s men, beating swords against shields, were driving back a larger number of East Anglians who seemed reluctant to fight and equally reluctant to surrender. I knew we would be attacked down there soon, but the immediate danger came from the men manning the walls on either side of the gate. For the moment, dazed and confused by our sudden assault, they were holding back, but other men were running along the walls, coming to retake the gate.

They were coming because Immar had pulled down the leaping stag and hoisted the blood-drenched banner of King Æthelstan. The dragon and the lightning bolt now flew above the Crepelgate, and revenge for that was coming.

The Crepelgate. Under the pitiless midday sun we had to hold the gate, and I remembered that Alfred, distressed by the number of maimed and blinded folk in Lundene, many of them men he had led into battle, had issued a decree allowing cripples to beg from travellers at this gate. Was that an omen? We had to defend the gate now and the fight would surely make more cripples. I touched the silver hammer, then cleaned the blood from my borrowed sword and slid her back into her scabbard.

And knew she must be drawn again soon.

Thirteen

The enemy’s first response was ragged, brave, and ineffectual. The troops manning the long stretches of the wall either side of the captured Crepelgate attacked along the ramparts, but a shield wall of just four men could easily defend the width of the fighting platform. A dozen men, arrayed in three ranks, would be an even more formidable obstacle, but the day’s heat and the undoubted ferocity of the enemy’s attacks would wear that small force down fast, so I had men bringing stones from the nearby ruins. We piled them on the fighting platform to make two crude barricades, and by the time the wall’s defenders to our west had organised a disciplined assault, our makeshift wall was already knee high. Gerbruht and Folcbald led that defence, using the spears we had captured from the West Saxons, and within a short time the knee-high wall was heightened by mail-clad corpses. Wihtgar, to the east, faced less opposition, and his men went on piling stones.