The short, stout arrows shot across the camp, driving through leather and mail and flesh.
Already the front rank had hooked onto their tackle to reload, while the second rank stepped forward between them, looked to Shef, caught his signal, loosed their second volley.
Shouts of alarm and disbelief were now mingling with cries of pain as the warriors saw men falling, all to the rear of the battle. Heads turned, faces pale in the dawn’s light, to see the silent death that was striking them from the rear, while the Vikings of the Way still kept up their violent pressure from the front, expending energy furiously in an assault they had been promised would last only minutes.
The first row of bowmen was ready again. As each man finished loading, he stepped through the line in front to resume rank. Some faster than others. Shef waited impassively till the last had formed up—the lines must be kept separate if this maneuver was to work—before he dropped his arm again.
Four times the lines shot before the first of the defenders could turn, order themselves and race across the camp in a wavering line, hindered by collapsed tents and the embers of cooking fires. As they closed, the bowmen obeyed orders again. Shot if they had loaded, then turned and ran with the rest, through the ranks of halberdiers dressed behind them. The halberdiers shifted sideways to let their fellows pass, then closed ranks again in a solid line of points.
“Don’t advance, just stand!” shouted Shef as he followed the last of the crossbows through. Few could hear him over the growing din of war-cries. Yet he knew this was the moment Brand had said would not work: the puny slave-born taking the full weight of a Viking charge.
The English obeyed their orders. Stood still, points leveled, second rank bracing the first. Even a man whose belly crawled with fear knew he had to do no more than he could. And the Viking charge did not come with full weight. Too many men shot down, and those the leaders; too many of the rest, uncertain, unprepared. The wave that came to hack at the wall of steel came piecemeal. Each man who ran in faced a point in front, blades chopping from either side. The blows they swung were caught by long shafts thrusting from the rear ranks. Slowly the Vikings drew back from the unshaken line, looking round for leadership.
As they did so a cry of triumph rang from behind them. Viga-Brand, seeing the battle-line in front of him thin and shred, had thrown his picked men through the center of what remained, to wheel instantly and to start to roll up the Ragnarsson line.
Beaten men began to throw their weapons down.
From the riverbank Ivar Ragnarsson stood and watched his men fall, then surrender. Sleeping in his ship, the Lindormr, he had rolled from his blankets too late to be more than an observer. Now he knew that he had lost this battle.
He knew why, too. The last few days of blood and slaughter had been a delight for him, a relief. The easing of some frenzy that had lain within him for many years, consoled only now and then and only for a time by the brief pleasures his brothers had arranged for him, or by the grand executions the Great Army had tolerated as appropriate. A delight for him; the army had slowly sickened of it. It had rotted their morale. Not much. Enough to make them put a little less than their best into the desperate defense they had needed.
He did not regret what he had done. What he regretted was that this attack could only come from one man, from the Sigvarthsson. The attack in the night, the instant breaching of his defenses. Then, when his warriors rallied for battle, the cowardly attack from the rear. The engagement was truly lost. He had fled a lost battle before—must he flee again? The victors were close on him, and on the other side of the river—moved across on clumsy punts and rafts five miles downstream—waited the ten torsion dart-throwers, lined up wheel to wheel, guided to their position by willing local churls. As the light strengthened, the twist-shooter teams lowered their sights on to the Ragnarsson ships.