“If we are God's chosen instrument to vanquish the heathen and his legion of demons, then why does He punish us so?” Æthelwulf asked his Lord and Savior, on his knees with his hands clasped together. Normally, when praying, he would strike himself with a whip as penance for unworthy thoughts and doubts. Yet, the heathens had attacked their force with near impunity, and their Lord Father, God Almighty, required every able soldier so he restrained and limited himself to kneeling on small stones.
He knelt in his tent before a cross, completely alone. A measure that his father had taken to ensure that he didn't fall to the sickness that ripped through the camp like a wild fire.
It had been in the aftermath of the first raid that they found rotting meat and other filth in their food supplies, with many only discovering what had been in their cooking pots when they reached the bottom. Many had gotten sick, their bodies attempting to purge their humors with a flux. They were racked with such pains that most couldn't do more than raise their heads from their beds.
It was regrettable, but they had thought that would be the end of it by morning the next day. Many were still weak, struggling to keep food down, but they were recovering from their purge. Others, however, did not. They fell ill with fevers, their bodies continuing to purge, even when they had nothing left in them. Father ordered those that were sick to be sequestered from those still healthy, but it came too late because by the third day, the number of sick had jumped. Most didn’t even know that they were ill until they bent over to pick something up and found they couldn't control their bowls.
Now, five days later, it felt like more people were sick than not.
“It is the Devil's work,” Æthelwulf continued. “I know this. But… why do you not protect us? Why has this trial been foisted upon good Christians?” He continued, his head held low. Doubts clawed at him. He had never doubted his faith. He loved God with the entirety of his heart, and he was certain that He would be at their side on the battlefield, making victory a promise.
But now doubts coiled in his guts like a nest of vipers. For more than a week, they had suffered nightly raids from the heathens. Sometimes they harried their flanks, other times their center or rear. Twice, they had carved a line through their formations to accomplish specific goals -- to destroy their food supplies and to kill or steal their horses, be it war horses or pack animals.
In the former, they failed. Father had spread the supplies throughout the camp, foreseeing the Heathen King's attempts, but it did mean that they still lost a portion of their supplies. Their raids on the warhorses were far more effective. They had burned their feed, forcing them to graze, which left them isolated to be picked off. Or they baited them to give chase before shooting the horses from underneath their riders with a hail of arrows. Of the two thousand warhorses that they’d started the march with, they had less than five hundred now.
His heart was wavering. He did not doubt the power of God- never that. But he doubted that it was His plan for them to emerge victorious. And he could not see why God would allow such a thing… and that… that scared him.
“My lord,” a voice from outside the tent spoke up. “Your meal has been delivered.”
A rebuke for interrupting his prayer was on his lips, but the man couldn't have known he was praying. No one had been allowed in his tent in days, and Æthelwulf had been forbidden from leaving it.
“My thanks,” he told the man. “I will break my fast after my morning prayers.” He heard a muttered response through the fabric, leaving Æthelwulf to turn his gaze to their Lord and Savior hanging from a jeweled cross, His visage so life-like it was as if he were gazing upon Jesus Christ himself. “My apologies. For… for my doubts. For the interruption. I just…”
His lips thinned and his head lowered, “I am a weaker man than I thought.”
It was easy to have faith when it wasn't being tested. And their faith was being tested.
Making a cross, he bowed his head low once more and uttered, “Amen,” before raising to his feet. Fetching his breakfast, Æthelwulf spied a familiar shadow cast upon his tent. “Lord Pepin,” Æthelwulf greeted his father's twisted advisor and disgraced prince of the now Roman Empire born anew.
Æthelwulf wasn't certain what to make of Pepin. By rights, he should be the prince of an empire whose history stretched back more than a thousand years. Yet, he was cast adrift to distant shores because of his twisted shape. There was part of him that felt pity for Pepin. Another part that felt a measure of disgust at his disfigurement.
But both parts were smaller than the one that feared the hunchbacked prince. Pepin was smart in the way his father was smart. In ways that Æthelwulf knew that he wasn’t. Yet while his father could rely on charming smiles and his position, Pepin had nothing, and he felt all the more dangerous because of it.
“I have come with news, Prince Æthelwulf,” Pepin sat outside the tent on a box, his voice low. “Another hundred and thirty died of this pox last night. Another twenty this morning, with more to come by noon.”
A hundred and fifty souls lost before they could draw the blood of heathens and avenge their ravaging. “And the afflicted?”
“Your father's containment has slowed the spread, but it has made us vulnerable in other ways,” Pepin answered.
Æthelwulf clenched his hands into fists. “The losses from the raid?”
“Three hundred. More wounded,” Pepin answered, his voice grim. He understood exactly what that meant. “The isolated sections of camp… they are vulnerable and they suffer for it. Siegfried rains arrows down upon them while concentrating his strength to strike where we are vulnerable.”
Meaning that the only reason why they hadn't lost more to the pox that tore through the camp was that Siegfried had killed many of the sick. Their strength was being bled from them drop by drop. Since the raids began, perhaps five thousand had perished. An absurd number, but when considering the whole of their army, it was barely a dip in their numbers.
“Killing us isn't the point,” Æthelwulf repeated a point he felt like he had made a hundred times by now, but no one was truly listening. “He attacks our morale. Not us. He is delivering the message that he can attack us with impunity and that we are too weak to defend ourselves. How long is it before the army fractures and we lose more men to deserters than we do to sickness or battle?”
“I am afraid that we are already well on our way, Prince Æthelwulf,” Pepin replied, and he was one of the few who understood their poor positioning. “A band of thirty village men attempted to sneak out during the raid. We found their heads on stakes outside of our camp. At the very least, Siegfried seems to be helping us with our deserter problem.”
To an untrained eye, such a thing might seem like madness. Æthelwulf saw what it was, however -- it was a statement. They were huddling up in their pens like sheep, while he was the wolf that stalked outside. That all they could do was huddle together and hope that they were the ones taken in the night.
“And my father?” Æthelwulf started, frustration welling up from his chest to the back of his throat. “What does he have to say to this mess?”
“He is of split-” Æthelwulf didn't need to hear the rest. It was the same answer he had received every time he asked. An answer he was sick of. As sick as he was of the canvas walls of his tent.
“Enough,” Æthelwulf decided, standing up. “I have had enough of his indecisiveness.”
Pepin had an answer ready, telling Æthelwulf that his response was no surprise. “Your father is currently in a council meeting. Half are attempting to convince him to pursue battle and the other half peace.” The latter half were a growing voice. They were those who had lost their faith in their righteous cause. They were those who let themselves be consumed by doubt over why God would allow them to be hobbled and suffer so.
“Then perhaps one more voice is needed,” Æthelwulf said, knowing that he was being manipulated. He could feel the strings on him as he stormed out of his tent, breathing the closest thing he had come to fresh air in days. It was a question of who was pulling them, but even if he was being manipulated to a goal -- that didn’t mean the goal was unworthy.
He marched to his father’s tent, which had been moved to be kept isolated. A secondary palisade was erected around it with guards set paces apart, just to ensure that no one managed to slip by them in the middle of the night. Be they Englishmen or Scandinavian. The guards made to stop him but he waved them off with a hand, storming into his father’s tent to see that it was a storm of arguments.
Lords were shouting at one another until they were red in the face, spit flying and they beat on the wood table with their fists like it were the enemy. At the head of the table was his father, his expression an impassive mask. He did not seem surprised to see Æthelwulf, who announced himself by slamming his hands on the other end of the table.
“We attack!” He joined his voice into the storm of arguments, and his declaration was met with a chorus of agreement and denials. “We attack while we still have the strength, Father. Before he bleeds us anymore. Before cowardice and doubt infect our men alongside this pox he has cursed us with. We attack! We have to! Or we have failed in our duty as men and Christians! We will have failed God Himself!”
He wasn’t good with words. Not like his father, King Ecbert of Wessex, was. He always knew what to say and how to say it. He could tell a man to go to hell and make them look forward to the trip. It was a talent that Æthelwulf found entirely lacking in himself. However, where his father spoke flowery words, never making his true thoughts known to anyone but himself… Æthelwulf was direct.
He was like a blade, cutting right to the point. In his father’s eyes, that was a weakness. But being blunt had its own strengths.
“We,” Father began, his voice decidedly even, “are being baited into a trap, my lords and son. There is no battlefield nearby where we can use the one true and genuine advantage we have. We must delay a battle, press on until we find more advantageous grounds.”
“And when we arrive, we will have half an army!” A lord called out, and the argument almost resumed, only to be forestalled by his father raising a hand.
“I am not blind to the cost,” Father replied. “However, as I have said time and time again -- if we are to commit to a battle now, then we would be doing so on Siegfried’s terms.”
“Let him dictate! God wills our victory, so we will be victorious!” The faction that desired war was building momentum, stamping their feet and their voices becoming a chorus of approval. “The Heathen doesn’t have the stomach for a true battle! If he did, then he wouldn’t stalk about in the dark! He’s a coward!”
Æthelwulf didn’t think he disagreed with anything more viscerally in his entire life, but he didn’t raise his voice to disagree. Instead, he looked across the table imploringly at his father, gripping the edges of it with white knuckles. They had to fight. They had to. Win or lose, God’s will or not -- if they did not fight, then they would lose their honor. Their pride.
To slink away from the Heathens now, after they had ravaged Mercia and Northumbria so thoroughly, would cost them everything that they had built. It would leave a stain on their family name that would never wash out, even after a thousand years.
“A Heathen, absolutely. A coward? Perhaps. But there is one thing I will never accuse Siegfried of, and that is being a fool,” Father rebuked. Another hand forestalled an argument. “However,” he continued with deliberate slowness, “I find the arguments compelling. All the more so because they come from my son.”
It was then that Æthelwulf realized that it was his father's strings that had been on him. He was a prop for the argument. An excuse for Father to commit to a course of action without a loss of face with the opposing side.
“If we cannot reach a favorable battlefield, then we must change our approach to the battle,” Father continued, spreading his hands wide. “What I suggest is thus -- we divide our army in two. Two smaller armies of seventy thousand will have greater maneuverability and like the jaws of a trap, we can lure the Heathen in.”
“Of course, the stronger of the two armies -- our soldiers that have been spared the pox, our proud lords, and what cavalry we still possess. The other… it will possess our ill and our weakest. Its purpose is to serve as a deterrent on one flank, rather than to win the battle.” It was a serviceable solution to their issues. Even if they were laden with a plague, seventy thousand men was still seventy thousand men. They alone outnumbered the enemy, but their presence on the battlefield would force Siegfried to divert forces to secure that flank, leaving even fewer men to deal with the true threat.
“I know your hearts well, my lords, so allow me to make myself clear -- I will lead the weakened army. It is not a position of glory, I know, but we do not fight for glory.” Father continued, fuelling the mutters that flared up but turned into whispers of amazement. Respect. They saw his acceptance as a sacrifice, giving away what they deemed invaluable for the sake of victory.
It couldn't be further from the truth.
“Though, I do hope you will not begrudge me if my son holds a position of honor in the left wing in my stead,” Father continued, and the thumps of approval were all the answer that was needed. Æthelwulf met his father's gaze, who inclined his head to him. Æthelwulf returned the gesture, elated, but with it came a heavy weight on his shoulders. The left wing was the pivotal wing. The wing that often decided the fate of the battle, possibly even entire kingdoms.
He would not command it, which was something of a relief, but the burden of leadership was still there.
The meeting continued on, the momentum was behind the faction that favored battle, so those that favored negotiation found themselves boxed out of the conversation. Plans were discussed, altered, discarded, reworked, and then implemented. They spoke at length at the few advantages that they did have and among the few was they had more archers than the Heathens several times over.
What took place in the tent was quick to spread amongst their people. Upon hearing that they would fight the Heathens, many shook off the air of despair that hung over them. They gained a sense of purpose beyond waiting to fall ill and die.
Father, despite all appearances, had been quietly preparing for the day. Bows and arrows were made, armor was repaired, as were weapons. By noon, Father gave the order to march out of the camp they had huddled inside for days. And despite all of the concerns and gumption the lords showed, none argued the fact that the terrain was poor for them.
There were flatlands, but there were hills jutting out almost at random, and even in the flatlands, there were subtle dips and elevations. Which was something of an advantage as it would hamper the Heathens’ cavalry. Somewhat.
The Heathens had already selected their battleground, forcing them to come out to meet them. The battlefield did favor them. Intensely so. They secured a steep hill, one side of which had nearly vertical cliffside. A position that they’d further reinforced with ditches and earthworks.
Æthelwulf swallowed a swell of bitterness, knowing that their hesitation had allowed the enemy to entrench themselves. All the worse, by the time they arrived, the Heathen army already stood in formation, allowing the afternoon sun to shine down on them -- their armor glimmered in the light, and Æthelwulf felt a clenching in his stomach at the sight of it.
He wore armor. A steel helm, a chain mail hauberk, and a padded gambason underneath. He was amongst the few that did, as it was a luxury available to only the highest lords amongst them. It was a harsh contrast in comparison to the Heathens. All on their front line wore full sets of armor -- chainmail and plate, the same that was reserved for Charlemagne's Paladins. They stood shoulder by shoulder, flags flapping in the wind bearing a double headed raven that marked them as Siegfried the Wolf-Kissed's army.
Their cavalry was split in two groups at the base of the hill in a lopsided manner. One side had nearly ten thousand according to the reports, while the other had about five. In either case, they had no hope of advantage there. Æthelwulf sat on top of one of the few horses that they had left in a company of five hundred. As it was, their cavalry would only truly be useful to escape rather than fight.
At the very head of the army sat Siegfried himself, on top of a warhorse that seemed to have been bred with purpose to be large enough to carry him. He wore armor in a similar style to that of his men, all except for the black wolf pelt that was closer to the size of a bear that hung off his shoulders and a crown that was hammered into his helmet.
The Heathens allowed their army to form up into what amounted to a crooked V formation. Æthelwulf expected to see the Heathen line shuffle in response, but no one seemed to move a muscle in the enemy formation.
They stood across from one another for what felt like eternity, but in reality couldn't have been more than a minute.
And then a horn blew and every single carefully crafted plan was shattered into countless pieces when the Heathens did the very last thing Æthelwulf expected. That anyone expected.
They charged.