Читать книгу The Last Kingdom Series Books 4-6: Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 22

The church of Saint Alban was ancient. The lower walls were of stone, which meant the Romans had built it, though at some time the roof had fallen in and the upper masonry had crumbled, so that now almost everything above head height was made of timber, wattle and thatch. The church lay on the main street of Lundene, which ran north and south from what was now called the Bishop’s Gate down to the broken bridge. Beocca once told me that the church had been a royal chapel for the Mercian kings, and perhaps he was right. ‘And Alban was a soldier!’ Beocca had added. He always got enthusiastic when he talked about the saints whose stories he knew and loved, ‘So you should like him!’

‘I should like him simply because he was a soldier?’ I had asked sceptically.

‘Because he was a brave soldier!’ Beocca told me, ‘and,’ he paused, snuffling excitedly because he had important information to impart, ‘and when he was martyred the eyes of his executioner fell out!’ He beamed at me with his own one good eye. ‘They fell out, Uhtred! Just popped out of his head! That was God’s punishment, you see? You kill a holy man and God pulls out your eyes!’

‘So Brother Jænberht wasn’t holy?’ I had suggested. Jænberht was a monk I had killed in a church, much to the horror of Father Beocca and a crowd of other watching churchmen. ‘I’ve still got my eyes, father,’ I pointed out.

‘You deserve to be blinded!’ Beocca had said, ‘but God is merciful. Strangely merciful at times, I must say.’

I had thought about Alban for a while. ‘Why,’ I had then asked, ‘if your god can pull out a man’s eyes, didn’t he just save Alban’s life?’

‘Because God chose not to, of course!’ Beocca had answered sniffily, which is just the kind of answer you always get when you ask a Christian priest to explain another inexplicable act of their god.

‘Alban was a Roman soldier?’ I had asked, choosing not to query his god’s capriciously cruel nature.

‘He was a Briton,’ Beocca told me, ‘a very brave and very holy Briton.’

‘Does that mean he was Welsh?’

‘Of course it does!’

‘Maybe that’s why your god let him die,’ I said, and Beocca had made the sign of the cross and rolled his good eye to heaven.

So, though Alban was a Welshman, and we Saxons have no love for the Welsh, there was a church named for him in Lundene, and that church appeared as dead as the dead saint’s corpse when Gisela, Finan and I arrived. The street was night black. Some small firelight escaped past the window shutters of a few houses, and a tavern was loud with singing in a nearby street, but the church was black and silent. ‘I don’t like it,’ Gisela whispered, and I knew she had touched the amulet around her neck. Before we left the house she had cast her runesticks, hoping to see some pattern to this night, but the random fall of the sticks had mystified her.

Something moved in a nearby alleyway. It might have been nothing more than a rat, but both Finan and I turned, swords hissing out of our scabbards, and the noise in the alleyway immediately stopped. I let Serpent-Breath slide back into her fleece-lined scabbard.

The three of us were wearing dark cloaks with hoods so, if anyone was watching, they must have thought we were priests or monks as we stood outside Saint Alban’s dark and silent door. No light showed past that door’s edges. I tried to open it, pulling on the short rope that lifted the latch inside, but the door was apparently barred. I pushed hard, rattling the locked door, then beat on its timbers with a fist, but there was no response. Then Finan touched my arm and I heard the footsteps. ‘Over the street,’ I whispered, and we crossed to the alleyway where we had heard the noise. The small, tight passage stank of sewage.

‘They’re priests,’ Finan whispered to me.

Two men were walking down the street. They were momentarily visible in the small light cast by a loosely shuttered window and I saw their black robes and the glint from the silver crosses they wore on their breasts. They stopped at the church and one knocked hard on the barred door. He gave three knocks, paused, gave a single rap, paused again, then knocked three times more.

We heard the bar lifted and the creak of hinges as the door was swung open, then light flooded into the street as a curtain inside the doorway was pulled aside. A priest or monk let the two men step into the candlelit church, then peered up and down the roadway and I knew he was searching for whoever had rattled the door a few moments earlier. A question must have been called to him, for he turned and gave an answer. ‘No one here, lord,’ he said, then pulled the door shut. I heard the locking bar drop and, for an instant, light showed about the doorframe until the curtain inside was pulled closed and the church was dark again.

‘Wait,’ I said.

We waited, listening to the wind rustle across the thatched roofs and moan in the ruined houses. I waited a long time, letting the memory of the rattled door subside.

‘It must be close to midnight,’ Gisela whispered.

‘Whoever opens the door,’ I said softly, ‘has to be silenced.’ I did not know what was happening inside the church, but I did know it was so secret that the church was locked and a coded knock was needed to enter, and I also knew that we were uninvited, and that if the man who opened the door made a protest at our arrival then we might never discover Æthelflaed’s danger.

‘Leave him to me,’ Finan said happily.

‘He’s a churchman,’ I whispered, ‘does that worry you?’

‘In the dark, lord, all cats are black.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Leave him to me,’ the Irishman said again.

‘Then let’s go to church,’ I said, and the three of us crossed the street and I knocked hard on the door. I knocked three times, gave a single rap, then knocked three times again.

It took a long time for the door to be opened, but at last the bar was lifted and the door was pushed outwards. ‘They’ve started,’ a robed figure whispered, then gasped as I seized his collar and pulled him into the street where Finan hit him in the belly. The Irishman was a small man, but had extraordinary strength in his lithe arms, and the robed figure bent double with a sudden gasp. The door’s inner curtain had fallen across the opening and no one inside the church could see what happened outside. Finan punched the man again, felling him, then knelt on the fallen figure. ‘You go away,’ Finan whispered, ‘if you want to live. You just go a very long way from the church and you forget you ever saw us. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ the man said.

Finan tapped the man on the head to reinforce the order, then stood up and we saw the dark figure scrabble to his feet and stumble away downhill. I waited a brief while to make sure he had really gone, then the three of us stepped inside and Finan pulled the door shut and dropped the bar into its brackets.

And I pushed the curtain aside.

We were in the darkest part of the church, but I still felt exposed because the far end, where the altar stood, was ablaze with rushlights and wax candles. A line of robed men stood facing the altar and their shadows shrouded us. One of those priests turned towards us, but he just saw three cloaked and hooded figures and must have assumed we were more priests because he turned back to the altar.

It took me a moment to see who was on the altar’s wide shallow dais because they were hidden by the priests and monks, but then the churchmen all bowed to the silver crucifix and I saw Æthelred and Aldhelm standing on the left-hand side of the altar while Bishop Erkenwald was on the right. Between them was Æthelflaed. She wore a white linen shift belted just beneath her small breasts and her fair hair was hanging loose, as if she were a girl again. She looked frightened. An older woman stood behind Æthelred. She had hard eyes and her grey hair was rolled into a tight scroll on the crown of her skull.

Bishop Erkenwald was praying in Latin and every few minutes the watching priests and monks, there were nine of them altogether, echoed his words. Erkenwald was dressed in red and white robes on which jewelled crosses had been sewn. His voice, always harsh, echoed from the stone walls, while the responses of the churchmen were a dull murmur. Æthelred looked bored, while Aldhelm seemed to be taking a quiet delight in whatever mysteries unfolded in that flame-lit sanctuary.

The bishop finished his prayers, the watching men all said amen, and then there was a slight pause before Erkenwald took a book from the altar. He unwrapped the leather covers, then turned the stiff pages to a place he had marked with a seagull’s feather. ‘This,’ he spoke in English now, ‘is the word of the Lord.’

‘Hear the word of the Lord,’ the priests and monks muttered.

‘If a man fears his wife has been unfaithful,’ the bishop spoke louder, his grating voice repeated by the echo, ‘he shall bring her before the priest! And he shall bring an offering!’ He stared pointedly at Æthelred who was dressed in a pale green cloak over a full coat of mail. He even wore his swords, something most priests would never allow in a church. ‘An offering!’ the bishop repeated.

Æthelred started as if he had been woken from a half-sleep. He fumbled in a pouch hanging from his sword belt and produced a small bag that he held towards the bishop. ‘Barley,’ he said.

‘As the Lord God commanded it,’ Erkenwald responded, but did not take the offered barley.

‘And silver,’ Æthelred added, hurriedly taking a second bag from his pouch.

Erkenwald took the two offerings and laid them in front of the crucifix. He bowed to the bright-gleaming image of his nailed god, then picked up the big book again. ‘This is the word of the Lord,’ he said fiercely, ‘that we take holy water in an earthen vessel, and of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take, and he shall put that dust in the water.’

The book was put back on the altar as a priest offered the bishop a crude pottery cup that evidently held holy water, for Erkenwald bowed to it, then stooped to the floor and scraped up a handful of dirt and dust. He poured the dirt into the water, then placed the cup on the altar before taking up the book again.

‘I charge thee, woman,’ he said savagely, looking from the book to Æthelflaed, ‘if no man hath lain with thee, and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness with another man instead of thy husband, then be thou free of the curse of this bitter water!’

‘Amen,’ one of the priests said.

‘The word of the Lord!’ another said.

‘But if thou hast gone aside to another man,’ Erkenwald spat the words as he read them, ‘and be defiled, then the Lord shall make thy thigh to rot and thy belly to swell.’ He put the book back on the altar. ‘Speak, woman.’

Æthelflaed just stared at the bishop. She said nothing. Her eyes were wide with fear.

‘Speak, woman!’ The bishop snarled. ‘You know what words you must say! So say them!’

Æthelflaed seemed too frightened to speak. Aldhelm whispered something to Æthelred who nodded, but did nothing. Aldhelm whispered again, and again Æthelred nodded, and this time Aldhelm took a pace forward and hit Æthelfaed. It was not a hard blow, just a slap around the head, but it was enough to force me to take an involuntary step forward. Gisela snatched my arm, checking me. ‘Speak, woman,’ Aldhelm ordered Æthelflaed.

‘Amen,’ Æthelflaed managed to whisper, ‘amen.’

Gisela’s hand was still on my arm. I patted her fingers as a signal that I was calm. I was angry, I was astonished, but I was calm. I stroked Gisela’s hand, then dropped my fingers to Serpent-Breath’s hilt.

Æthelflaed had evidently spoken the right words because Bishop Erkenwald took the earthen cup from the altar. He raised it high in front of the crucifix, as if showing it to his god, then he carefully poured a little of its dust-fouled water into a silver chalice. He held the pottery cup high again, then ceremoniously offered it to Æthelflaed. ‘Drink the bitter water,’ he ordered her.

Æthelflaed hesitated, then saw Aldhelm’s mailed arm ready to strike her again and so she obediently reached for the cup. She took it, held it poised by her mouth for a brief moment, then closed her eyes, screwed up her face and drank the contents. The men watched intently, making certain she drained the cup. The candle flames flickered in a draught from the smoke-hole in the roof and somewhere in the city a dog suddenly howled. Gisela was clutching my arm now, her fingers tight as claws.

Erkenwald took the cup and, when he was satisfied that it was empty, nodded to Æthelred. ‘She drank it,’ the bishop confirmed. Æthelflaed’s face glistened where her tears reflected the wavering light from the altar on which, I now saw, was a quill pen, a pot of ink and a piece of parchment. ‘What I do now,’ Erkenwald said solemnly, ‘is in accordance with the word of God.’

‘Amen,’ the priests said. Æthelred was watching his wife as if he expected her flesh to start rotting before his eyes, while Æthelflaed herself was trembling so much that I thought she might collapse.

‘God commands me to write the curses down,’ the bishop announced, then bent to the altar. The quill scratched for a long time. Æthelred was still staring intently at Æthelflaed. The priests also watched her as the bishop scratched on. ‘And having written the curses,’ Erkenwald said, capping the ink pot, ‘I wipe them out according to the commands of Almighty God, our Father in heaven.’

‘Hear the word of the Lord,’ a priest said.

‘Praise his name,’ another said.

Erkenwald picked up the silver chalice into which he had poured a small amount of the dirty water and dribbled the contents onto the newly written words. He scrubbed at the ink with a finger, then held up the parchment to show that the writing had been smeared into oblivion. ‘It is done,’ he said pompously, then nodded at the grey-haired woman. ‘Do your duty!’ he commanded her.

The old, bitter-faced woman stepped to Æthelflaed’s side. The girl shrank away, but Aldhelm seized her by the shoulders. Æthelflaed shrieked in terror, and Aldhelm’s response was to cuff her hard around the head. I thought Æthelred must respond to that assault on his wife by another man, but he evidently approved for he did nothing except watch as Aldhelm took Æthelflaed by her shoulders again. He held her motionless as the old woman stooped to seize the hem of Æthelflaed’s linen shift. ‘No!’ Æthelflaed protested in a wailing, despairing voice.

‘Show her to us!’ Erkenwald snapped. ‘Show us her thighs and her belly!’

The woman obediently lifted the shift to reveal Æthelflaed’s thighs.

‘Enough!’ I shouted that word.

The woman froze. The priests were stooping to gaze at Æthelflaed’s bare legs and waiting for the dress to be lifted to reveal her belly. Aldhelm still held her by the shoulders, while the bishop was gaping towards the shadows at the church door from where I had spoken. ‘Who is that?’ Erkenwald demanded.

‘You evil bastards,’ I said as I walked forward, my steps echoing from the stone walls, ‘you filthy earslings.’ I remember my anger from that night, a cold and savage fury that had driven me to intervene without thinking of the consequences. My wife’s priests all preach that anger is a sin, but a warrior who does not have anger is no true warrior. Anger is a spur, it is a goad, it overcomes fear to make a man fight, and I would fight for Æthelflaed that night. ‘She is a king’s daughter,’ I snarled, ‘so drop the dress!’

‘You will do as God tells you,’ Erkenwald snarled at the woman, but she dared neither drop the hem nor raise it further.

I pushed my way through the stooping priests, kicking one in the arse so hard that he pitched forward onto the dais at the bishop’s feet. Erkenwald had seized his staff, its silver finial curved like a shepherd’s crook, and he swung it towards me, but checked his swing when he saw my eyes. I drew Serpent-Breath, her long steel scraping and hissing on the scabbard’s throat. ‘You want to die?’ I asked Erkenwald, and he heard the menace in my voice and his shepherd’s staff slowly went down. ‘Drop the dress,’ I told the woman. She hesitated. ‘Drop it, you filthy bitch-hag,’ I snarled, then sensed the bishop had moved and whipped Serpent-Breath around so that her blade shimmered just beneath his throat. ‘One word, bishop,’ I said, ‘just one word, and you meet your god here and now. Gisela!’ I called, and Gisela came to the altar. ‘Take the hag,’ I told her, ‘and take Æthelflaed, and see whether her belly has swollen or whether her thighs have rotted. Do it in decent privacy. And you!’ I turned the blade so that it pointed at Aldhelm’s scarred face, ‘take your hands off King Alfred’s daughter, or I will hang you from Lundene’s bridge and the birds will peck out your eyes and eat your tongue.’ He let go of Æthelflaed.

‘You have no right …’ Æthelred said, finding his tongue.

‘I come here,’ I interrupted him, ‘with a message from Alfred. He wishes to know where your ships are. He wishes you to set sail. He wishes you to do your duty. He wants to know why you are skulking here when there are Danes to kill.’ I put the tip of Serpent-Breath’s blade into the scabbard and let her fall home. ‘And,’ I went on when the sound of the sword had finished echoing in the church, ‘he wishes you to know that his daughter is precious to him, and he dislikes things that are precious to him being maltreated.’ I invented that message, of course.

Æthelred just stared at me. He said nothing, though there was a look of indignation on his jaw-jutting face. Did he believe I came with a message from Alfred? I could not tell, but he must have feared such a message for he knew he had been shirking his duty.

Bishop Erkenwald was just as indignant. ‘You dare to carry a sword in God’s house?’ he demanded angrily.

‘I dare do more than that, bishop,’ I said. ‘You’ve heard of Brother Jænberht? One of your precious martyrs? I killed him in a church and your god neither saved him nor stopped my blade.’ I smiled, remembering my own astonishment as I had cut Jænberht’s throat. I had hated that monk. ‘Your king,’ I said to Erkenwald, ‘wants his god’s work done, and that work is killing Danes, not amusing yourself by looking at a young girl’s nakedness.’

‘This is God’s work!’ Æthelred shouted at me.

I wanted to kill him then. I felt the twitch as my hand went to Serpent-Breath’s hilt, but just then the hag came back. ‘She’s …’ the woman started, then fell silent as she saw the look of hatred I was giving Æthelred.

‘Speak, woman!’ Erkenwald commanded.

‘She shows no signs, lord,’ the woman said grudgingly. ‘Her skin is unmarked.’

‘Belly and thighs?’ Erkenwald pressed the woman.

‘She is pure,’ Gisela spoke from a recess at the side of the church. She had an arm around Æthelflaed and her voice was bitter.

Erkenwald seemed discomfited by the report, but drew himself up and grudgingly acknowledged that Æthelflaed was indeed pure. ‘She is evidently undefiled, lord,’ he said to Æthelred, pointedly ignoring me. Finan was standing behind the watching priests, his presence a threat to them. The Irishman was smiling and watching Aldhelm who, like Æthelred, wore a sword. Either man could have tried to cut me down, but neither touched their weapon.

‘Your wife,’ I said to Æthelred, ‘is not undefiled. She’s defiled by you.’

His face jerked up as though I had slapped him. ‘You are …’ he began.

I unleashed the anger then. I was much taller and broader than my cousin, and I bullied him back from the altar to the side wall of the church, and there I spoke to him in a hiss of fury. Only he could hear what I said. Aldhelm might have been tempted to rescue Æthelred, but Finan was watching him, and the Irishman’s reputation was enough to ensure that Aldhelm did not move. ‘I have known Æthelflaed since she was a small child,’ I told Æthelred, ‘and I love her as if she was my own child. Do you understand that, earsling? She is like a daughter to me, and she is a good wife to you. And if you touch her again, cousin, if I see one more bruise on Æthelflaed’s face, I shall find you and I shall kill you.’ I paused, and he was silent.

I turned and looked at Erkenwald. ‘And what would you have done, bishop,’ I sneered, ‘if the Lady Æthelflaed’s thighs had rotted? Would you have dared kill Alfred’s daughter?’

Erkenwald muttered something about condemning her to a nunnery, not that I cared. I had stopped close beside Aldhelm and looked at him. ‘And you,’ I said, ‘struck a king’s daughter.’ I hit him so hard that he spun into the altar and staggered for balance. I waited, giving him a chance to fight back, but he had no courage left so I hit him again and then stepped away and raised my voice so that everyone in the church could hear. ‘And the King of Wessex orders the Lord Æthelred to set sail.’

Alfred had sent no such orders, but Æthelred would hardly dare ask his father-in-law whether he had or not. As for Erkenwald, I was sure he would tell Alfred that I had carried a sword and made threats inside a church, and Alfred would be angry at that. He would be more angry with me for defiling a church than he would be with the priests for humiliating his daughter, but I wanted Alfred to be angry. I wanted him to punish me by dismissing me from my oath and thus releasing me from his service. I wanted Alfred to make me a free man again, a man with a sword, a shield and enemies. I wanted to be rid of Alfred, but Alfred was far too clever to allow that. He knew just how to punish me.

He would make me keep my oath.

It was two days later, long after Gunnkel had fled from Hrofeceastre, that Æthelred at last sailed. His fleet of fifteen warships, the most powerful fleet Wessex had ever assembled, slid downriver on the ebb tide, propelled by an angry message that was delivered to Æthelred by Steapa. The big man had ridden from Hrofeceastre, and the message he carried from Alfred demanded to know why the fleet lingered while the defeated Vikings fled. Steapa stayed that night at our house. ‘The king is unhappy,’ he told me over supper, ‘I’ve never seen him so angry!’ Gisela was fascinated by the sight of Steapa eating. He was using one hand to hold pork ribs that he flensed with his teeth, while the other fed bread into a spare corner of his mouth. ‘Very angry,’ he said, pausing to drink ale. ‘The Sture,’ he added mysteriously, picking up a new slab of ribs.

‘The Sture?’

‘Gunnkel made a camp there, and Alfred thinks he’s probably gone back to it.’

The Sture was a river in East Anglia, north of the Temes. I had been there once and remembered a wide mouth protected from easterly gales by a long spit of sandy land. ‘He’s safe there,’ I said.

‘Safe?’ Steapa asked.

‘Guthrum’s territory.’

Steapa paused to pull a scrap of meat from between his teeth. ‘Guthrum sheltered him there. Alfred doesn’t like it. Thinks Guthrum has to be smacked.’

‘Alfred’s going to war with East Anglia?’ Gisela asked, surprised.

‘No, lady. Just smacking him,’ Steapa said, crunching his jaws on some crackling. I reckoned he had eaten half a pig and showed no signs of slowing down. ‘Guthrum doesn’t want war, lady. But he has to be taught not to shelter pagans. So he’s sending the Lord Æthelred to attack Gunnkel’s camp on the Sture, and while he’s at it to steal some of Guthrum’s cattle. Just smack him.’ Steapa gave me a solemn look. ‘Pity you can’t come.’

‘It is,’ I agreed.

And why, I wondered, had Alfred chosen Æthelred to lead an expedition to punish Guthrum? Æthelred was not even a West Saxon, though he had sworn an oath to Alfred of Wessex. My cousin was a Mercian, and the Mercians have never been famous for their ships. So why choose Æthelred? The only explanation I could find was that Alfred’s eldest son, Edward, was still a child with an unbroken voice and Alfred himself was a sick man. He feared his own death, and he feared the chaos that could descend on Wessex if Edward took the throne as a child. So Alfred was offering Æthelred a chance to redeem himself for his failure to trap Gunnkel’s ships in the Medwæg, and an opportunity to make himself a reputation large enough to persuade the thegns and ealdormen of Wessex that Æthelred, Lord of Mercia, could rule them if Alfred died before Edward was old enough to succeed.

Æthelred’s fleet carried a message to the Danes of East Anglia. If you raid Wessex, Alfred was saying, then we shall raid you. We shall harry your coast, burn your houses, sink your ships and leave your beaches stinking of death. Alfred had made Æthelred into a Viking, and I was jealous. I wanted to take my ships, but I had been ordered to stay in Lundene, and I obeyed. Instead I watched the great fleet leave Lundene. It was impressive. The largest of the captured warships had thirty oars a side, and there were six of those, while the smallest had banks of twenty. Æthelred was leading almost a thousand men on his raid, and they were all good men; warriors from Alfred’s household and from his own trained troops. Æthelred sailed in one of the large ships that had once carried a great raven’s head, scorched black, on her stem, but that beaked image was gone and now the ship was named Rodbora, which meant ‘carrier of the cross’, and her stem-post was now decorated with a massive cross and she sailed with warriors aboard, and with priests, and, of course, with Æthelflaed, for Æthelred would go nowhere without her.

It was summer. Folk who have never lived in a town during the summer cannot imagine the stench of it, nor the flies. Red kites flocked in the streets, living off carrion. When the wind was north the smell of the urine and animal dung in the tanners’ pits mixed with the city’s own stench of human sewage. Gisela’s belly grew, and my fear for her grew with it.

I went to sea as often as I could. We took Sea-Eagle and Sword of the Lord down the river on the ebb tide and came back with the flood. We hunted ships from Beamfleot, but Sigefrid’s men had learned their lesson and they never left their creek with fewer than three ships in company. Yet, though those groups of ships hunted prey, trade was at last reaching Lundene, for the merchants had learned to sail in large convoys. A dozen ships would keep each other company, all with armed men aboard and so Sigefrid’s pickings were scanty, but so were mine.

I waited two weeks for news of my cousin’s expedition, and learned its fate on a day when I made my usual excursion down the Temes. There was always a blessed moment as we left the smoke and smells of Lundene and felt the clean sea winds. The river looped about wide marshes where herons stalked. I remember being happy that day because there were blue butterflies everywhere. They settled on the Sea-Eagle and on the Sword of the Lord that followed in our wake. One insect perched on my outstretched finger where it opened and closed its wings.

‘That means good luck, lord,’ Sihtric said.

‘It does?’

‘The longer it stays there, the longer your luck lasts,’ Sihtric said, and held out his own hand, but no blue butterfly settled there.

‘Looks like you’ve no luck,’ I said lightly. I watched the butterfly on my finger and thought of Gisela and of childbirth. Stay there, I silently ordered the insect, and it did.

‘I’m lucky, lord,’ Sihtric said, grinning.

‘You are?’

‘Ealhswith’s in Lundene,’ he said. Ealhswith was the whore whom Sihtric loved.

‘There’s more trade for her in Lundene than in Coccham,’ I said.

‘She stopped doing that,’ Sihtric said fiercely.

I looked at him, surprised. ‘She has?’

‘Yes, lord. She wants to marry me, lord.’

He was a good-looking young man, hawk-faced, black-haired and well built. I had known him since he was almost a child, and I supposed that altered my impression of him, for I still saw the frightened boy whose life I had spared in Cair Ligualid. Ealhswith, perhaps, saw the young man he had become. I looked away, watching a tiny trickle of smoke rising from the southern marshes and I wondered whose fire it was and how they lived in that mosquito-haunted swamp. ‘You’ve been with her a long time,’ I said.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Send her to me,’ I said. Sihtric was sworn to me and he needed my permission to marry because his wife would become a part of my household and thus my responsibility. ‘I’ll talk to her,’ I added.

‘You’ll like her, lord.’

I smiled at that. ‘I hope so,’ I said.

A flight of swans beat between our boats, their wings loud in the summer air. I was feeling content, all but for my fears about Gisela, and the butterfly was allaying that worry, though after a while it launched itself from my finger and fluttered clumsily in the southwards wake of the swans. I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt, then my amulet, and sent a prayer to Frigg that Gisela would be safe.

It was midday before we were abreast of Caninga. The tide was low and the mudflats stretched into the calm estuary where we were the only ships. I took Sea-Eagle close to Caninga’s southern shore and stared towards Beamfleot’s creek, but I could see nothing useful through the heat haze that shimmered above the island. ‘Looks like they’ve gone,’ Finan commented. Like me he was staring northwards.

‘No,’ I said, ‘there are ships there.’ I thought I could see the masts of Sigefrid’s ships through the wavering air.

‘Not as many as there should be,’ Finan said.

‘We’ll take a look,’ I said, and so we rowed around the island’s eastern tip, and discovered that Finan was right. Over half of Sigefrid’s ships had left the little River Hothlege.

Only three days before there had been thirty-six masts in the creek and now there were just fourteen. I knew the missing ships had not gone upriver towards Lundene, for we would have seen them, and that left only two choices. Either they had gone east and north about the East Anglian coast, or else they had rowed south to make another raid into Cent. The sun, so hot and high and bright, winked reflected dazzling light from the spear-points on the ramparts of the high camp. Men watched us from that high wall, and they saw us turn and hoist our sails and use a small north-east wind that had stirred since dawn to carry us south across the estuary. I was looking for a great smear of smoke that would tell me a raiding party had landed to attack, plunder and burn some town, but the sky over Cent was clear. We dropped the sail and rowed east towards the Medwæg’s mouth, and still saw no smoke, and then Finan, sharp-eyed and posted in our bows, saw the ships.

Six ships.

I was looking for a fleet of at least twenty boats, not some small group of ships, and at first I took no notice, assuming the six were merchant ships keeping company as they rowed towards Lundene, but then Finan came hurrying back between the rowers’ benches. ‘They’re warships,’ he said.

I peered eastwards. I could see the dark flecks of the hulls, but my eyes were not so keen as Finan’s and I could not make out their shapes. The six hulls flickered in the heat haze. ‘Are they moving?’ I asked.

‘No, lord.’

‘Why anchor there?’ I wondered. The ships were on the far side of the Medwæg’s mouth, just off the point called Scerhnesse, which means ‘bright headland’, and it was a strange place to anchor for the currents swirled strong off the low point.

‘I think they’re grounded, lord,’ Finan said. If the ships had been anchored I would have assumed they were waiting for the flood tide to carry them upriver, but grounded boats usually meant men had gone ashore, and the only reason to go ashore was to find plunder.

‘But there’s nothing left to steal on Scaepege,’ I said, puzzled. Scerhnesse lay at the western end of Scaepege, which was an island on the southern side of the Temes’s estuary, and Scaepege had been harried and harrowed and harried again by Viking raids. Few folk lived there, and those that did hid in the creeks. The channel between Scaepege and the mainland was known as the Swealwe, and whole Viking fleets had sheltered there in bad weather. Scaepege and the Swealwe were dangerous places, but not places to find silver or slaves.

‘We’ll go closer,’ I said. Finan went back to the prow as Ralla, in Sword of the Lord, pulled abreast of the Sea-Eagle. I pointed at the distant ships. ‘We’re taking a look at those six boats!’ I called across the gap. Ralla nodded, shouted an order, and his oars bit into the water.

I saw Finan was right as we crossed the Medwæg’s wide mouth; the six were warships, all of them longer and leaner than any cargo-carrying vessel, and all six had been beached. A trickle of smoke drifted south and west, suggesting the crews had lit a fire ashore. I could see no beast-heads on the prows, but that meant nothing. Viking crews might well regard the whole of Scaepege as Danish territory and so take down their dragons, eagles, ravens and serpents to prevent frightening the spirits of the island.

I called Clapa to the steering-oar. ‘Take her straight towards the ships,’ I ordered him, then went forward to join Finan in the prow. Osferth was on one of the oars, sweating and glowering. ‘Nothing like rowing to put on muscle,’ I told him cheerfully, and was rewarded with a scowl.

I clambered up beside the Irishman. ‘They look like Danes,’ he greeted me.

‘We can’t fight six crews,’ I said.

Finan scratched his groin. ‘They making a camp there, you think?’ That was a nasty thought. It was bad enough that Sigefrid’s ships sailed from the northern side of the estuary, without another vipers’ nest being built on the southern bank.

‘No,’ I said, because for once my eyes had proved sharper than the Irishman’s. ‘No,’ I said, ‘they’re not making a camp.’ I touched my amulet.

Finan saw the gesture and heard the anger in my voice. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘The ship on the left,’ I said, pointing, ‘that’s Rodbora.’ I had seen the cross mounted on the stem-post.

Finan’s mouth opened, but he said nothing for a moment. He just stared. Six ships, just six ships, and fifteen had left Lundene. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ,’ Finan finally spoke. He made the sign of the cross. ‘Perhaps the others have gone upriver?’

‘We’d have seen them.’

‘Then they’re coming behind?’

‘You’d better be right,’ I said grimly, ‘or else it’s nine ships gone.’

‘God, no.’

We were close now. The men ashore saw the eagle’s head on my boat and took me for a Viking and some ran into the shallows between two of the stranded ships and made a shield wall there, daring me to attack. ‘That’s Steapa,’ I said, seeing the huge figure at the centre of the shield wall. I ordered the eagle taken down, then stood with my arms outstretched, empty-handed, to show I came in peace. Steapa recognised me, and the shields went down and the weapons were sheathed. A moment later Sea-Eagle’s bows slid soft onto the sandy mud. The tide was rising, so she was safe.

I dropped over the side into water that came to my waist and waded ashore. I reckoned there were at least four hundred men on the beach, far too many for just six ships and, as I neared the shore, I could see that many of those men were wounded. They lay with blood-soaked bandages and pale faces. Priests knelt among them while, at the top of the beach, where pale grass topped the low dunes, I could see that crude driftwood crosses had been driven into newly dug graves.

Steapa waited for me, his face grimmer than ever. ‘What happened?’ I asked him.

‘Ask him,’ Steapa said, sounding bitter. He jerked his head along the beach and I saw Æthelred sitting close to the fire on which a cooking pot bubbled gently. His usual entourage was with him, including Aldhelm, who watched me with a resentful face. None of them spoke as I walked towards them. The fire crackled. Æthelred was toying with a piece of bladderwrack and, though he must have been aware of my approach, he did not look up.

I stopped beside the fire. ‘Where are the other nine ships?’ I asked.

Æthelred’s face jerked up, as though he were surprised to see me. He smiled. ‘Good news,’ he said. He expected me to ask what that news was, but I just watched him and said nothing. ‘We have won,’ he said expansively, ‘a great victory!’

‘A magnificent victory,’ Aldhelm interjected.

I saw that Æthelred’s smile was forced. His next words were halting, as if it took a great effort to string them together. ‘Gunnkel,’ he said, ‘has been taught the power of our swords.’

‘We burned their ships!’ Aldhelm boasted.

‘And made great slaughter,’ Æthelred said, and I saw that his eyes were glistening.

I looked up and down the beach where the wounded lay and where the uninjured sat with bowed heads. ‘You left with fifteen ships,’ I said.

‘We burned their ships,’ Æthelred said, and I thought he was going to cry.

‘Where are the other nine ships?’ I demanded.

‘We stopped here,’ Aldhelm said, and he must have thought I was being critical of their decision to beach the boats, ‘because we could not row against the falling tide.’

‘The other nine ships?’ I asked again, but received no answer. I was still searching the beach and what I sought I could not find. I looked back at Æthelred, whose head had dropped again, and I feared to ask the next question, but it had to be asked. ‘Where is your wife?’ I demanded.

Silence.

‘Where,’ I spoke louder, ‘is Æthelflaed?’

A gull sounded its harsh, forlorn cry. ‘She is taken,’ Æthelred said at last in a voice so small that I could barely hear him.

‘Taken?’

‘A captive,’ Æthelred said, his voice still low.

‘Sweet Jesus Christ,’ I said, using Finan’s favourite expletive. The wind stirred the bitter smoke into my face. For a moment I did not believe what I had heard, but all around me was evidence that Æthelred’s magnificent victory had really been a catastrophic defeat. Nine ships were gone, but ships could be replaced, and half of Æthelred’s troops were missing, yet new men could be found to replace those dead, but what could replace a king’s daughter? ‘Who has her?’ I asked.

‘Sigefrid,’ Aldhelm muttered.

Which explained where the missing ships from Beamfleot had gone.

And Æthelflaed, sweet Æthelflaed, to whom I had made an oath, was a captive.

Our eight ships rode the flooding tide back up the Temes to Lundene. It was a summer’s evening, limpid and calm, in which the sun seemed to linger like a giant red globe suspended in the veil of smoke that clouded the air above the city. Æthelred made the voyage in Rodbora and, when I let Sea-Eagle drop back to row alongside that ship, I saw the black streaks where blood had stained her timbers. I quickened the oar strokes and pulled ahead again.

Steapa travelled with me in the Sea-Eagle and the big man told me what had happened in the River Sture.

It had, indeed, been a magnificent victory. Æthelred’s fleet had surprised the Vikings as they made their encampment on the river’s southern bank. ‘We came at dawn,’ Steapa said.

‘You stayed all night at sea?’

‘Lord Æthelred ordered it,’ Steapa said.

‘Brave,’ I commented.

‘It was a calm night,’ Steapa said dismissively, ‘and at first light we found their ships. Sixteen ships.’ He stopped abruptly. He was a taciturn man and found it difficult to speak more than a few words together.

‘Beached?’ I asked.

‘They were anchored,’ he said.

That suggested the Danes had wanted their vessels to be ready at any state of the tide, but it also meant the ships could not be defended because their crews had been mostly ashore where they were throwing up earth walls to make a camp. Æthelred’s fleet had made short work of the few men aboard the enemy vessels, and then the great rope-wrapped stones that served as anchors had been hauled up and the sixteen ships were towed to the northern bank and beached there. ‘He was going to keep them there,’ Steapa explained, ‘till he was finished, then bring them back.’

‘Finished?’ I asked.

‘He wanted to kill all the pagans before we left,’ Steapa said, and explained how Æthelred’s fleet had marauded up the Sture and its adjacent river, the Arwan, landing men along the banks to burn Danish halls, slaughter Danish cattle and, when they could, to kill Danes. The Saxon raiders had caused panic. Folk had fled inland, but Gunnkel, left shipless in his encampment at the mouth of the Sture, had not panicked.

‘You didn’t attack the camp?’ I asked Steapa.

‘Lord Æthelred said it was too well protected.’

‘I thought you said it was unfinished?’

Steapa shrugged. ‘They hadn’t built the palisade,’ he said, ‘at least on one side, so we could have got in and killed them, but we’d have lost a lot of our own men too.’

‘True,’ I admitted.

‘So we attacked farms instead,’ Steapa went on, and while Æthelred’s men raided the Danish settlements, Gunnkel had sent messengers southwards to the other rivers of the East Anglian coast. There, on those riverbanks, were other Viking encampments. Gunnkel was summoning reinforcements.

‘I told Lord Æthelred to leave,’ Steapa said gloomily, ‘I told him on the second day. I said we’d stayed long enough.’

‘He wouldn’t listen to you?’

‘He called me a fool,’ Steapa said with a shrug. Æthelred had wanted plunder, and so he had stayed in the Sture and his men brought him anything they could find of value, from cooking pots to reaping knives. ‘He found some silver,’ Steapa said, ‘but not much.’

And while Æthelred stayed to enrich himself, the sea-wolves gathered.

Danish ships came from the south. Sigefrid’s ships had sailed from Beamfleot, joining other boats that rowed from the mouths of the Colaun, the Hwealf and the Pant. I had passed those rivers often enough and imagined the lean fast boats sliding out through the mudbanks on the ebbing tides, with their high prows fiercely decorated with beasts and their hulls filled with vengeful men, shields and weapons.

The Danish ships gathered off the island of Horseg, south of the Sture in the wide bay that is haunted by wildfowl. Then, on a grey morning, under a summer rainstorm that blew in from the sea, and on a flooding tide made stronger by a full moon, thirty-eight ships came from the ocean to enter the Sture.

‘It was a Sunday,’ Steapa said, ‘and the Lord Æthelred insisted we listen to a sermon.’

‘Alfred will be pleased to hear that,’ I said sarcastically.

‘It was on the beach,’ Steapa said, ‘where the Danish boats were grounded.’

‘Why there?’

‘Because the priests wanted to drive the evil spirits from the boats,’ he said, and told me how the beast-heads from the captured ships had been stacked in a great pile on the sand. Driftwood had been packed around them, along with straw from a nearby thatch, and then, to loud prayers from the priests, the heap had been set alight. Dragons and eagles, ravens and wolves had burned, their flames leaping high, and the smoke of the great fire must have blown inland as the rain spat and hissed on the burning wood. The priests had prayed and chanted, crowing their victory over the pagans, and no one had noticed the dark shapes coming through the seawards drizzle.

I can only imagine the fear, the flight and the slaughter. Danes leaping ashore. Sword-Danes, spear-Danes, axe-Danes. The only reason so many men had escaped was that so many were dying. The Danes had started their killing, and found so many men to kill that they could not reach those who fled to the ships. Other Danish boats were attacking the Saxon fleet, but Rodbora