Читать книгу The Last Kingdom Series Books 1-6 - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 24

I suppose, if you are reading this, that you have learned your letters, which probably means that some damned monk or priest rapped your knuckles, cuffed you around the head or worse. Not that they did that to me, of course, for I was no longer a child, but I endured their sniggers as I struggled with letters. It was mostly Beocca who taught me, complaining all the while that I was taking him from his real work which was the making of a life of Swithun, who had been Bishop of Wintanceaster when Alfred was a child, and Beocca was writing the bishop’s life. Another priest was translating the book into Latin, Beocca’s mastery of that tongue not being good enough for the task, and the pages were being sent to Rome in hopes that Swithun would be named a saint. Alfred took a great interest in the book, forever coming to Beocca’s room and asking whether he knew that Swithun had once preached the gospel to a trout or chanted a psalm to a seagull, and Beocca would write the stories in a state of great excitement, and then, when Alfred was gone, reluctantly return to whatever text he was forcing me to decipher. ‘Read it aloud,’ he would say, then protest wildly. ‘No, no, no! Forliðan is to suffer shipwreck! This is a life of Saint Paul, Uhtred, and the apostle suffered shipwreck! Not the word you read at all!’

I looked at it again. ‘It’s not forlegnis?’

‘Of course it’s not!’ he said, going red with indignation. ‘That word means …’ he paused, realising that he was not teaching me English, but how to read it.

‘Prostitute,’ I said, ‘I know what it means. I even know what they charge. There’s a redhead in Chad’s tavern who …’

‘Forliðan,’ he interrupted me, ‘the word is forliðan. Read on.’

Those weeks were strange. I was a warrior now, a man, yet in Beocca’s room it seemed I was a child again as I struggled with the black letters crawling across the cracked parchments. I learned from the lives of the saints, and in the end Beocca could not resist letting me read some of his own growing life of Swithun. He waited for my praise, but instead I shuddered. ‘Couldn’t we find something more interesting?’ I asked him.

‘More interesting?’ Beocca’s good eye stared at me reproachfully.

‘Something about war,’ I suggested, ‘about the Danes. About shields and spears and swords.’

He grimaced. ‘I dread to think of such writings! There are some poems,’ he grimaced again and evidently decided against telling me about the belligerent poems, ‘but this,’ he tapped the parchment, ‘this will give you inspiration.’

‘Inspiration! How Swithun mended some broken eggs?’

‘It was a saintly act,’ Beocca chided me. ‘The woman was old and poor, the eggs were all she had to sell, and she tripped and broke them. She faced starvation! The saint made the eggs whole again and, God be praised, she sold them.’

‘But why didn’t Swithun just give her money?’ I demanded, ‘or take her back to his house and give her a proper meal?’

‘It is a miracle!’ Beocca insisted, ‘a demonstration of God’s power.’

‘I’d like to see a miracle,’ I said, remembering King Edmund’s death.

‘That is a weakness in you,’ Beocca said sternly. ‘You must have faith. Miracles make belief easy, which is why you should never pray for one. Much better to find God through faith than through miracles.’

‘Then why have miracles?’

‘Oh, read on, Uhtred,’ the poor man said tiredly, ‘for God’s sake, read on.’

I read on. But life in Cippanhamm was not all reading. Alfred hunted at least twice a week, though it was not hunting as I had known it in the north. He never pursued boar, preferring to shoot at stags with a bow. The prey was driven to him by beaters, and if a stag did not appear swiftly he would get bored and go back to his books. In truth I think he only went hunting because it was expected of a king, not because he enjoyed it, but he did endure it. I loved it, of course. I killed wolves, stags, foxes and boars and it was on one of those boar hunts that I met Æthelwold.

Æthelwold was Alfred’s oldest nephew, the boy who should have succeeded his father, King Æthelred, though he was no longer a boy for he was only a month or so younger than me, and in many ways he was like me, except that he had been sheltered by his father and by Alfred and so had never killed a man or even fought in a battle. He was tall, well-built, strong and as wild as an unbroken colt. He had long dark hair, his family’s narrow face, and strong eyes that caught the attention of serving girls. All girls, really. He hunted with me and with Leofric, drank with us, whored with us when he could escape the priests who were his guardians, and constantly complained about his uncle, though those complaints were only spoken to me, never to Leofric whom Æthelwold feared. ‘He stole the crown,’ Æthelwold said of Alfred.

‘The witan thought you were too young,’ I pointed out.

‘I’m not young now, am I?’ he asked indignantly, ‘so Alfred should step aside.’

I toasted that idea with a pot of ale, but said nothing.

‘They won’t even let me fight!’ Æthelwold said bitterly. ‘He says I ought to become a priest. The stupid bastard.’ He drank some ale before giving me a serious look. ‘Talk to him, Uhtred.’

‘What am I to say? That you don’t want to be a priest?’

‘He knows that. No, tell him I’ll fight with you and Leofric.’

I thought about that for a short while, then shook my head. ‘It won’t do any good.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘he fears you making a name for yourself.’

Æthelwold frowned at me. ‘A name?’ he asked, puzzled.

‘If you become a famous warrior,’ I said, knowing I was right, ‘men will follow you. You’re already a prince, which is dangerous enough, but Alfred won’t want you to become a famous warrior prince, will he?’

‘The pious bastard,’ Æthelwold said. He pushed his long black hair off his face and gazed moodily at Eanflæd, the redhead who was given a room in the tavern and brought it a deal of business. ‘God, she’s pretty,’ he said. ‘He was caught humping a nun once.’

‘Alfred was? A nun?’

‘That’s what I was told. And he was always after girls. Couldn’t keep his breeches buttoned! Now the priests have got hold of him. What I ought to do,’ he went on gloomily, ‘is slit the bastard’s gizzard.’

‘Say that to anyone but me,’ I said, ‘and you’ll be hanged.’

‘I could run off and join the Danes,’ he suggested.

‘You could,’ I said, ‘and they’d welcome you.’

‘Then use me?’ he asked, showing that he was not entirely a fool.

I nodded. ‘You’ll be like Egbert or Burghred, or that new man in Mercia.’

‘Ceolwulf.’

‘King at their pleasure,’ I said. Ceolwulf, a Mercian Ealdorman, had been named king of his country now that Burghred was on his knees in Rome, but Ceolwulf was no more a real king than Burghred had been. He issued coins, of course, and he administered justice, but everyone knew there were Danes in his council chamber and he dared do nothing that would earn their wrath. ‘So is that what you want?’ I asked. ‘To run off to the Danes and be useful to them?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’ He traced a pattern on the table with spilt ale. ‘Better to do nothing,’ he suggested.

‘Nothing?’

‘If I do nothing,’ he said earnestly, ‘then the bastard might die. He’s always ill! He can’t live long, can he? And his son is just a baby. So if he dies I’ll be king! Oh, sweet Jesus!’ This blasphemy was uttered because two priests had entered the tavern, both of them in Æthelwold’s entourage, though they were more like jailers than courtiers and they had come to find him and take him off to his bed.

Beocca did not approve of my friendship with Æthelwold. ‘He’s a foolish creature,’ he warned me.

‘So am I, or so you tell me.’

‘Then you don’t need your foolishness encouraged, do you? Now let us read about how the holy Swithun built the town’s East Gate.’

By the Feast of the Epiphany I could read as well as a clever twelve-year-old, or so Beocca said, and that was good enough for Alfred who did not, after all, require me to read theological texts, but only to decipher his orders, should he ever decide to give me any, and that, of course, was the heart of the matter. Leofric and I wanted to command troops, to which end I had endured Beocca’s teaching and had come to appreciate the holy Swithun’s skill with trout, seagulls and broken eggs, but the granting of those troops depended on the king, and in truth there were not many troops to command.

The West Saxon army was in two parts. The first and smaller part was composed of the king’s own men, his retainers who guarded him and his family. They did nothing else because they were professional warriors, but they were not many and neither Leofric nor I wanted anything to do with them because joining the household guard would mean staying in close proximity to Alfred which, in turn, would mean going to church.

The second part of the army, and by far the largest, was the fyrd, and that, in turn, was divided among the shires. Each shire, under its Ealdorman and reeve, was responsible for raising the fyrd that was supposedly composed of every able-bodied man within the shire boundary. That could raise a vast number of men. Hamptonscir, for example, could easily put three thousand men under arms, and there were nine shires in Wessex capable of summoning similar numbers. Yet, apart from the troops who served the Ealdormen, the fyrd was mostly composed of farmers. Some had a shield of sorts, spears and axes were plentiful enough, but swords and armour were in short supply, and worse, the fyrd was always reluctant to march beyond its shire borders, and even more reluctant to serve when there was work to be done on the farm. At Æsc’s Hill, the one battle the West Saxons had won against the Danes, it had been the household troops who had gained the victory. Divided between Alfred and his brother they had spearheaded the fighting while the fyrd, as it usually did, looked menacing, but only became engaged when the real soldiers had already won the fight. The fyrd, in brief, was about as much use as a hole in a boat’s bottom, but that was where Leofric could expect to find men.

Except there were those ships’ crews getting drunk in Hamtun’s winter taverns and those were the men Leofric wanted, and to get them he had to persuade Alfred to relieve Hacca of their command, and luckily for us Hacca himself came to Cippanhamm and pleaded to be released from the fleet. He prayed daily, he told Alfred, never to see the ocean again. ‘I get seasick, lord.’

Alfred was always sympathetic to men who suffered sickness because he was so often ill himself, and he must have known that Hacca was an inadequate commander of ships, but Alfred’s problem was how to replace him. To which end he summoned four bishops, two abbots and a priest to advise him, and I learned from Beocca that they were all praying about the new appointment. ‘Do something!’ Leofric snarled at me.

‘What the devil am I supposed to do?’

‘You have friends who are priests! Talk to them. Talk to Alfred, Earsling.’ He rarely called me that any more, only when he was angry.

‘He doesn’t like me,’ I said. ‘If I ask him to put us in charge of the fleet he’ll give it to anyone but us. He’ll give it to a bishop, probably.’

‘Hell!’ Leofric said.

In the end it was Eanflæd who saved us. The redhead was a merry soul and had a particular fondness for Leofric, and she heard us arguing and sat down, slapped her hands on the table to silence us, and then asked what we were fighting about. Then she sneezed because she had a cold.

‘I want this useless earsling,’ Leofric jerked his thumb at me, ‘to be named commander of the fleet, only he’s too young, too ugly, too horrible and too pagan, and Alfred’s listening to a pack of bishops who’ll end up naming some wizened old fart who doesn’t know his prow from his prick.’

‘Which bishops?’ Eanflæd wanted to know.

‘Scireburnan, Wintanceaster, Winburnan and Exanceaster,’ I said.

She smiled, sneezed again, and two days later I was summoned to Alfred’s presence. It turned out that the Bishop of Exanceaster was partial to redheads.

Alfred greeted me in his hall; a fine building with beams, rafters and a central stone hearth. His guards watched us from the doorway where a group of petitioners waited to see the king, and a huddle of priests prayed at the hall’s other end, but the two of us were alone by the hearth where Alfred paced up and down as he talked. He said he was thinking of appointing me to command the fleet. Just thinking, he stressed. God, he went on, was guiding his choice, but now he must talk with me to see whether God’s advice chimed with his own intuition. He put great store by intuition. He once lectured me about a man’s inner eye, and how it could lead us to a higher wisdom, and I dare say he was right, but appointing a fleet commander did not need mystical wisdom, it needed finding a raw fighter willing to kill some Danes. ‘Tell me,’ he went on, ‘has learning to read bolstered your faith?’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said with feigned eagerness.

‘It has?’ He sounded dubious.

‘The life of Saint Swithun,’ I said, waving a hand as if to suggest it had overwhelmed me, ‘and the stories of Chad!’ I fell silent as if I could not think of praise sufficient for that tedious man.

‘The blessed Chad!’ Alfred said happily. ‘You know men and cattle were cured by the dust of his corpse?’

‘A miracle, lord,’ I said.

‘It is good to hear you say as much, Uhtred,’ Alfred said, ‘and I rejoice in your faith.’

‘It gives me great happiness, lord,’ I replied with a straight face.

‘Because it is only with faith in God that we shall prevail against the Danes.’

‘Indeed, lord,’ I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, wondering why he did not just name me commander of the fleet and be done with it.

But he was in a discursive mood. ‘I remember when I first met you,’ he said, ‘and I was struck by your childlike faith. It was an inspiration to me, Uhtred.’

‘I am glad of it, lord.’

‘And then,’ he turned and frowned at me, ‘I detected a lessening of faith in you.’

‘God tries us, lord,’ I said.

‘He does! He does!’ He winced suddenly. He was always a sick man. He had collapsed in pain at his wedding, though that might have been the horror of realising what he was marrying, but in truth he was prone to bouts of sudden griping agony. That, he had told me, was better than his first illness, which had been an affliction of ficus, which is a real endwerc, so painful and bloody that at times he had been unable to sit, and sometimes that ficus came back, but most of the time he suffered from the pains in his belly. ‘God does try us,’ he went on, ‘and I think God was testing you. I would like to think you have survived the trial.’

‘I believe I have, lord,’ I said gravely, wishing he would just end this ridiculous conversation.

‘But I still hesitate to name you,’ he admitted. ‘You are young! It is true you have proved your diligence by learning to read and that you are nobly born, but you are more likely to be found in a tavern than in a church. Is that not true?’

That silenced me, at least for a heartbeat or two, but then I remembered something Beocca had said to me during his interminable lessons and, without thinking, without even really knowing what they meant, I said the words aloud. ‘“The son of man is come eating and drinking”,’ I said, ‘“and …”’

‘“You say, look, a greedy man and a drinker!”’ Alfred finished the words for me. ‘You are right, Uhtred, right to chide me. Glory to God! Christ was accused of spending his time in taverns, and I forgot it. It is in the scriptures!’

The gods help me, I thought. The man was drunk on God, but he was no fool, for now he turned on me like a snake. ‘And I hear you spend time with my nephew. They say you distract him from his lessons.’

I put my hand on my heart. ‘I will swear an oath, lord,’ I said, ‘that I have done nothing except dissuade him from rashness.’ And that was true, or true enough. I had never encouraged Æthelwold in his wilder flights of fancy that involved cutting Alfred’s throat or running away to join the Danes. I did encourage him to ale, whores and blasphemy, but I did not count those things as rash. ‘My oath on it, lord,’ I said.

The word oath was powerful. All our laws depend on oaths. Life, loyalty and allegiance depend on oaths, and my use of the word persuaded him. ‘I thank you,’ he said earnestly, ‘and I should tell you, Uhtred, that to my surprise the Bishop of Exanceaster had a dream in which a messenger of God appeared to him and said that you should be made commander of the fleet.’

‘A messenger of God?’ I asked.

‘An angel, Uhtred.’

‘Praise God,’ I said gravely, thinking how Eanflæd would enjoy discovering that she was now an angel.

‘Yet,’ Alfred said, and winced again as pain flared in his arse or belly, ‘yet,’ he said again, and I knew something unexpected was coming. ‘I worry,’ he went on, ‘that you are of Northumbria, and that your commitment to Wessex is not of the heart.’

‘I am here, lord,’ I said.

‘But for how long?’

‘Till the Danes are gone, lord.’

He ignored that. ‘I need men bound to me by God,’ he said, ‘by God, by love, by duty, by passion and by land.’ He paused, looking at me, and I knew the sting was in that last word.

‘I have land in Northumbria,’ I said, thinking of Bebbanburg.

‘West Saxon land,’ he said, ‘land that you will own, land that you will defend, land that you will fight for.’

‘A blessed thought,’ I said, my heart sinking at what I suspected was coming.

Only it did not come immediately, instead he abruptly changed the subject and talked, very sensibly, about the Danish threat. The fleet, he said, had succeeded in reducing the Viking raids, but he expected the new year to bring a Danish fleet, and one much too large for our twelve ships to oppose. ‘I dare not lose the fleet,’ he said, ‘so I doubt we should fight their ships. I’m expecting a land army of pagans to come down the Temes and for their fleet to assault our south coast. I can hold one, but not the other, so the fleet commander’s job will be to follow their ships and harry them. Distract them. Keep them looking one way while I destroy their land army.’

I said I thought that was a good idea, which it probably was, though I wondered how twelve ships were supposed to distract a whole fleet, but that was a problem which would have to wait until the enemy fleet arrived. Alfred then returned to the matter of the land and that, of course, was the deciding factor which would give me or deny me the fleet. ‘I would tie you to me, Uhtred,’ he said earnestly.

‘I shall give you an oath, lord,’ I said.

‘You will indeed,’ he responded tartly, ‘but I still want you to be of Wessex.’

‘A high honour, lord,’ I said. What else could I say?

‘You must belong to Wessex,’ he said, then smiled as though he did me a favour. ‘There is an orphan in Defnascir,’ he went on, and here it came, ‘a girl, who I would see married.’

I said nothing. What is the point of protesting when the executioner’s sword is in mid swing?

‘Her name is Mildrith,’ he went on, ‘and she is dear to me. A pious girl, modest and faithful. Her father was reeve to Ealdorman Odda, and she will bring land to her husband, good land, and I would have a good man hold that good land.’

I offered a smile that I hoped was not too sickly. ‘He would be a fortunate man, lord,’ I said, ‘to marry a girl who is dear to you.’

‘So go to her,’ he commanded me, ‘and marry her,’ the sword struck, ‘and then I shall name you commander of the fleet.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said.

Leofric, of course, laughed like a demented jackdaw. ‘He’s no fool, is he?’ he said when he had recovered. ‘He’s making you into a West Saxon. So what do you know about this Miltewærc.’ Miltewærc is a pain in the spleen.

‘Mildrith,’ I said, ‘and she’s pious.’

‘Of course she’s pious. He wouldn’t want you to marry her if she was a leg-spreader.’

‘She’s an orphan,’ I said, ‘and aged about sixteen or seventeen.’

‘Christ! That old? She must be an ugly sow! But poor thing, she must be wearing out her knees praying to be spared a rutting from an earsling like you. But that’s her fate! So let’s get you married, then we can kill some Danes.’

It was winter. We had spent the Christmas feast at Cippanhamm, and that was no Yule, and now we rode south through frost and rain and wind. Father Willibald accompanied us, for he was still priest to the fleet, and my plan was to reach Defnascir, do what was grimly necessary, and then ride straight to Hamtun to make certain the winter work on the twelve boats was being done properly. It is in winter that ships are caulked, scraped, cleaned, and made tight for the spring, and the thought of ships made me dream of the Danes, and of Brida, and I wondered where she was, what she did, and whether we would meet again. And I thought of Ragnar. Had he found Thyra? Did Kjartan live? Theirs was another world now, and I knew I drifted away from it and was being entangled in the threads of Alfred’s tidy life. He was trying to make me into a West Saxon, and he was half succeeding. I was sworn now to fight for Wessex and it seemed I must marry into it, but I still clung to that ancient dream of retaking Bebbanburg.

I loved Bebbanburg and I almost loved Defnascir as much. When the world was made by Thor from the carcass of Ymir he did well when he fashioned Defnascir and its shire next door, Thornsæta. Both were beautiful lands of soft hills and quick streams, of rich fields and thick soil, of high heaths and good harbours. A man could live well in either shire, and I could have been happy in Defnascir had I not loved Bebbanburg more. We rode down the valley of the River Uisc, through well-tended fields of red earth, past plump villages and high halls until we came to Exanceaster which was the shire’s chief town. It had been made by the Romans who had built a fortress on a hill above the Uisc and surrounded it with a wall of flint, stone and brick, and the wall was still there and guards challenged us as we reached the northern gate.

‘We come to see Ealdorman Odda,’ Willibald said.

‘On whose business?’

‘The king’s,’ Willibald said proudly, flourishing a letter that bore Alfred’s seal, though I doubt the guards would have recognised it, but they seemed properly impressed and let us through into a town of decaying Roman buildings amidst which a timber church reared tall next to Ealdorman Odda’s hall.

The Ealdorman made us wait, but at last he came with his son and a dozen retainers, and one of his priests read the king’s letter aloud. It was Alfred’s pleasure that Mildrith should be married to his loyal servant, the Ealdorman Uhtred, and Odda was commanded to arrange the ceremony with as little delay as possible. Odda was not pleased at the news. He was an elderly man, at least forty years old, with grey hair and a face made grotesque by bulbous wens. His son, Odda the Younger, was even less pleased, for he scowled at the news. ‘It isn’t seemly, father,’ he complained.

‘It is the king’s wish.’

‘But …’

‘It is the king’s wish!’

Odda the Younger fell silent. He was about my age, almost nineteen, good-looking, black-haired, and elegant in a black tunic that was as clean as a woman’s dress and edged with gold thread. A golden crucifix hung at his neck. He gave me a grim look, and I must have appeared travel-stained and ragged to him, and after inspecting me and finding me about as appealing as a wet mongrel, he turned on his heel and stalked from the hall.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ Odda announced unhappily, ‘the bishop can marry you. But you must pay the bride price first.’

‘The bride price?’ I asked. Alfred had mentioned no such thing, though of course it was customary.

‘Thirty-three shillings,’ Odda said flatly, and with the hint of a smirk.

Thirty-three shillings was a fortune. A hoard. The price of a good war horse or a ship. It took me aback and I heard Leofric give a gasp behind me. ‘Is that what Alfred says?’ I demanded.

‘It is what I say,’ Odda said, ‘for Mildrith is my goddaughter.’

No wonder he smirked. The price was huge and he doubted I could pay it, and if I could not pay it then the girl was not mine and, though Odda did not know it, the fleet would not be mine either. Nor, of course, was the price merely thirty-three shillings, or 396 silver pence, it was double that, for it was also customary for a husband to give his new wife an equivalent sum after the marriage was consummated. That second gift was none of Odda’s business and I doubted very much whether I would want to pay it, just as Ealdorman Odda was now certain, from my hesitation, that I would not be paying him the bride price without which there could be no marriage contract.

‘I can meet the lady?’ I asked.

‘You may meet her at the ceremony tomorrow morning,’ Odda said firmly, ‘but only if you pay the bride price. Otherwise, no.’

He looked disappointed as I opened my pouch and gave him one gold coin and thirty-six silver pennies. He looked even more disappointed when he saw that was not all the coin I possessed, but he was trapped now. ‘You may meet her,’ he told me, ‘in the cathedral tomorrow.’

‘Why not now?’ I asked.

‘Because she is at her prayers,’ the Ealdorman said, and with that he dismissed us.

Leofric and I found a place to sleep in a tavern close to the cathedral, which was the bishop’s church, and that night I got drunk as a spring hare. I picked a fight with someone, I have no idea who, and only remember that Leofric, who was not quite as drunk as me, pulled us apart and flattened my opponent, and after that I went into the stable yard and threw up all the ale I had just drunk. I drank some more, slept badly, woke to hear rain seething on the stable roof and then vomited again.

‘Why don’t we just ride to Mercia?’ I suggested to Leofric. The king had lent us horses and I did not mind stealing them.

‘What do we do there?’

‘Find men?’ I suggested. ‘Fight?’

‘Don’t be daft, Earsling,’ Leofric said. ‘We want the fleet. And if you don’t marry the ugly sow, I don’t get to command it.’

‘I command it,’ I said.

‘But only if you marry,’ Leofric said, ‘and then you’ll command the fleet and I’ll command you.’

Father Willibald arrived then. He had slept in the monastery next door to the tavern and had come to make sure I was ready, and looked alarmed at my ragged condition. ‘What’s that mark on your face?’ he asked.

‘Bastard hit me last night,’ I said, ‘I was drunk. So was he, but I was more drunk. Take my advice, father, never get into a fight when you’re badly drunk.’

I drank more ale for breakfast. Willibald insisted I wear my best tunic, which was not saying much for it was stained, crumpled and torn. I would have preferred to wear my coat of mail, but Willibald said that was inappropriate for a church, and I suppose he was right, and I let him brush me down and try to dab the worst stains out of the wool. I tied my hair with a leather lace, strapped on Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting, which again Willibald said I should not wear in a holy place, but I insisted on keeping the weapons, and then, a doomed man, I went to the cathedral with Willibald and Leofric.

It was raining as if the heavens were being drained of all their water. Rain bounced in the streets, flowed in streams down the gutters and leaked through the cathedral’s thatch. A brisk cold wind was coming from the east and it found every crack in the cathedral’s wooden walls so that the candles on the altars flickered and some blew out. It was a small church, not much bigger than Ragnar’s burned hall, and it must have been built on a Roman foundation for the floor was made of flagstones that were now being puddled by rainwater. The bishop was already there, two other priests fussed with the guttering candles on the high altar, and then Ealdorman Odda arrived with my bride.

Who took one look at me and burst into tears.

What was I expecting? A woman who looked like a sow, I suppose, a woman with a pox-scarred face and a sour expression and haunches like an ox. No one expects to love a wife, not if they marry for land or position, and I was marrying for land and she was marrying because she had no choice, and there really is no point in making too much of a fuss about it, because that is the way the world works. My job was to take her land, work it, make money, and Mildrith’s duty was to give me sons and make sure there was food and ale on my table. Such is the holy sacrament of marriage.

I did not want to marry her. By rights, as an Ealdorman of Northumbria, I could expect to marry a daughter of the nobility, a daughter who would bring much more land than twelve hilly hides in Defnascir. I might have expected to marry a daughter who could increase Bebbanburg’s holdings and power, but that was plainly not going to happen, so I was marrying a girl of ignoble birth who would now be known as the Lady Mildrith and she might have shown some gratitude for that, but instead she cried and even tried to pull away from Ealdorman Odda.

He probably sympathised with her, but the bride price had been paid, and so she was brought to the altar and the bishop, who had come back from Cippanhamm with a streaming cold, duly made us man and wife. ‘And may the blessing of God the Father,’ he said, ‘God the Son and God the Holy Ghost be on your union.’ He was about to say amen, but instead sneezed mightily.

‘Amen,’ Willibald said. No one else spoke.

So Mildrith was mine.

Odda the Younger watched as we left the church and he probably thought I did not see him, but I did, and I marked him down. I knew why he was watching.

For the truth of it, which surprised me, was that Mildrith was desirable. That word does not do her justice, but it is so very hard to remember a face from long ago. Sometimes, in a dream, I see her, and she is real then, but when I am awake and try to summon her face I cannot do it. I remember she had clear, pale skin, that her lower lip jutted out too much, that her eyes were very blue and her hair the same gold as mine. She was tall, which she disliked, thinking it made her unwomanly, and had a nervous expression, as though she constantly feared disaster, and that can be very attractive in a woman and I confess I found her attractive. That did surprise me, indeed it astonished me, for such a woman should have long been married. She was almost seventeen years old, and by that age most women have already given birth to three or four children or else been killed in the attempt, but as we rode to her holdings that lay to the west of the River Uisc’s mouth I heard some of her tale. She was being drawn in a cart by two oxen that Willibald had insisted garlanding with flowers. Leofric, Willibald and I rode alongside the cart, and Willibald asked her questions and she answered him readily enough for he was a priest and a kind man.

Her father, she said, had left her land and debts, and the debts were greater than the value of the land. Leofric sniggered when he heard the word debts. I said nothing, but just stared doggedly ahead.

The trouble, Mildrith said, had begun when her father had granted a tenth of his holdings as ælmesæcer, which is land devoted to the church. The church does not own it, but has the right to all that the land yields, whether in crops or cattle, and her father had made the grant, Mildrith explained, because all his children except her had died and he wanted to find favour with God. I suspected he had wanted to find favour with Alfred, for in Wessex an ambitious man was well advised to look after the church if he wanted the king to look after him.

But then the Danes had raided, cattle had been slaughtered, a harvest failed, and the church took her father to law for failing to provide the land’s promised yield. Wessex, I discovered, was very devoted to the law, and all the men of law are priests, every last one of them, which means that the law is the church, and when Mildrith’s father died the law had decreed that he owed the church a huge sum, quite beyond his ability to pay, and Alfred, who had the power to lift the debt, refused to do so. What this meant was that any man who married Mildrith married the debt, and no man had been willing to take that burden until a Northumbrian fool wandered into the trap like a drunk staggering downhill.

Leofric was laughing. Willibald looked worried.

‘So what is the debt?’ I asked.

‘Two thousand shillings, lord,’ Mildrith said in a very small voice.

Leofric almost choked laughing and I could have cheerfully killed him on the spot.

‘And it increases yearly?’ Willibald asked shrewdly.

‘Yes,’ Mildrith said, refusing to meet my eyes. A more sensible man would have explored Mildrith’s circumstances before the marriage contract was made, but I had just seen marriage as a route to the fleet. So now I had the fleet, I had the debt and I had the girl, and I also had a new enemy, Odda the Younger, who had plainly wanted Mildrith for himself, though his father, wisely, had refused to saddle his family with the crippling debt, nor, I suspected, did he want his son to marry beneath him.

There is a hierarchy among men. Beocca liked to tell me it reflected the hierarchy of heaven, and perhaps it does, but I know nothing of that, but I do know how men are ranked. At the top is the king, and beneath him are his sons, and then come the Ealdormen who are the chief nobles of the land and without land a man cannot be noble, though I was, because I have never abandoned my claim to Bebbanburg. The king and his Ealdormen are the power of a kingdom, the men who hold great lands and raise the armies, and beneath them are the lesser nobles, usually called reeves, and they are responsible for law in a lord’s land, though a man can cease to be a reeve if he displeases his lord. The reeves are drawn from the ranks of thegns, who are wealthy men who can lead followers to war, but who lack the wide holdings of noblemen like Odda or my father. Beneath the thegns are the ceorls, who are all free men, but if a ceorl loses his livelihood then he could well become a slave, which is the bottom of the dungheap. Slaves can be, and often are, freed, though unless a slave’s lord gives him land or money he will soon be a slave again. Mildrith’s father had been a thegn, and Odda had made him a reeve, responsible for keeping the peace in a wide swathe of southern Defnascir, but he had also been a thegn of insufficient land, whose foolishness had diminished the little he possessed, and so he had left Mildrith impoverished which made her unsuitable as a wife for an Ealdorman’s son, though she was reckoned good enough for an exiled lord from Northumbria. In truth she was just another pawn on Alfred’s chessboard and he had only given her to me so that I became responsible for paying the church a vast sum.

He was a spider, I thought sourly, a priestly-black spider spinning sticky webs, and I thought I had been so clever when I talked to him in the hall at Cippanhamm. In truth I could have prayed openly to Thor before pissing on the relics of Alfred’s altar and he would still have given me the fleet because he knew the fleet would have little to do in the coming war, and he had only wanted to trap me for his future ambitions in the north of England. So now I was trapped, and the bastard Ealdorman Odda had carefully let me walk into the trap.

The thought of Defnascir’s Ealdorman prompted a question from me. ‘What bride price did Odda give you?’ I asked Mildrith.

‘Fifteen shillings, lord.’

‘Fifteen shillings?’ I asked, shocked.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘The cheap bastard,’ I said.

‘Cut the rest out of him,’ Leofric snarled. A pair of very blue eyes looked at him, then at me, then vanished under the cloak again.

Her twelve hides of land, that were now mine, lay in the hills above the River Uisc’s sea-reach, in a place called Oxton which simply means a farm where oxen are kept. It was a shieling, as the Danes would say, a farmstead, and the house had a thatch so overgrown with moss and grass that it looked like an earth mound. There was no hall, and a nobleman needs a hall in which to feed his followers, but it did have a cattle shed and a pig shed and land enough to support sixteen slaves and five families of tenants, all of whom were summoned to greet me, as well as half a dozen household servants, most of whom were also slaves, and they welcomed Mildrith fondly for, since her father’s death, she had been living in the household of Ealdorman Odda’s wife while the farmstead was managed by a man called Oswald who looked about as trustworthy as a stoat.

That night we made a meal of peas, leeks, stale bread and sour ale, and that was my first marriage feast in my own house which was also a house under threat of debt. Next morning it had stopped raining and I breakfasted on more stale bread and sour ale, and then walked with Mildrith to a hilltop from where I could stare down at the wide sea-reach that lay across the land like the flattened grey blade of an axe. ‘Where do these folk go,’ I asked, meaning her slaves and tenants, ‘when the Danes come?’

‘Into the hills, lord.’

‘My name is Uhtred.’

‘Into the hills, Uhtred.’

‘You won’t go into the hills,’ I said firmly.

‘I won’t?’ Her eyes widened in alarm.

‘You will come with me to Hamtun,’ I said, ‘and we shall have a house there so long as I command the fleet.’

She nodded, plainly nervous, and then I took her hand, opened it, and poured in thirty-three shillings, so many coins that they spilt onto her lap. ‘Yours, wife,’ I said.

And so she was. My wife. And that same day we left, going eastwards, man and wife.

The story hurries now. It quickens like a stream coming to a fall in the hills and, like a cascade foaming down jumbled rocks, it gets angry and violent, confused even. For it was in that year, 876, that the Danes made their greatest effort yet to rid England of its last kingdom, and the onslaught was huge, savage and sudden.

Guthrum the Unlucky led the assault. He had been living in Grantaceaster, calling himself King of East Anglia, and Alfred, I think, assumed he would have good warning if Guthrum’s army left that place, but the West Saxon spies failed and the warnings did not come, and the Danish army was all mounted on horses, and Alfred’s troops were in the wrong place and Guthrum led his men south across the Temes and clear across all Wessex to capture a great fortress on the south coast. That fortress was called Werham and it lay not very far west of Hamtun, though between us and it lay a vast stretch of inland sea called the Poole. Guthrum’s army assaulted Werham, captured it, raped the nuns in Werham’s nunnery, and did it all before Alfred could react. Once inside the fortress Guthrum was protected by two rivers, one to the north of the town and the other to the south. To the east was the wide placid Poole and a massive wall and ditch guarded the only approach from the west.

There was nothing the fleet could do. As soon as we heard that the Danes were in Werham we readied ourselves for sea, but no sooner had we reached the open water than we saw their fleet and that ended our ambitions.

I have never seen so many ships. Guthrum had marched across Wessex with close to a thousand horsemen, but now the rest of his army came by sea and their ships darkened the water. There were hundreds of boats. Men later said three hundred and fifty, though I think there were fewer, but certainly there were more than two hundred. Ship after ship, dragon prow after serpent head, oars churning the dark sea white, a fleet going to battle, and all we could do was slink back into Hamtun and pray that the Danes did not sail up Hamtun Water to slaughter us.

They did not. The fleet sailed on to join Guthrum in Werham, so now a huge Danish army was lodged in southern Wessex, and I remembered Ragnar’s advice to Guthrum. Split their forces, Ragnar had said, and that surely meant another Danish army lay somewhere to the north, just waiting to attack, and when Alfred went to meet that second army, Guthrum would erupt from behind Werham’s walls to attack him in the rear.

‘It’s the end of England,’ Leofric said darkly. He was not much given to gloom, but that day he was downcast. Mildrith and I had taken a house in Hamtun, one close to the water, and he ate with us most nights we were in the town. We were still taking the ships out, now in a flotilla of twelve, always in hope of catching some Danish ships unawares, but their raiders only sallied out of the Poole in large numbers, never fewer than thirty ships, and I dared not lose Alfred’s navy in a suicidal attack on such large forces. In the height of the summer a Danish force came to Hamtun’s water, rowing almost to our anchorage, and we lashed our ships together, donned armour, sharpened weapons and waited for their attack. But they were no more minded for battle than we were. To reach us they would have to negotiate a mud-bordered channel and they could only put two ships abreast in that place and so they were content to jeer at us from the open water and then leave.

Guthrum waited in Werham and what he waited for, we later learned, was for Halfdan to lead a mixed force of Northmen and Britons out of Wales. Halfdan had been in Ireland, avenging Ivar’s death, and now he was supposed to bring his fleet and army to Wales, assemble a great army there and lead it across the Sæfern sea and attack Wessex. But, according to Beocca, God intervened. God or the three spinners. Fate is everything, for news came that Halfdan had died in Ireland, and of the three brothers only Ubba now lived, though he was still in the far wild north. Halfdan had been killed by the Irish, slaughtered along with scores of his men in a vicious battle, and so the Irish saved Wessex that year.

We knew none of that in Hamtun. We made our impotent forays and waited for news of the second blow that must fall on Wessex, and still it did not come, and then, as the first autumn gales fretted the coast, a messenger came from Alfred, whose army was camped to the west of Werham, demanding that I go to the king. The messenger was Beocca and I was surprisingly pleased to see him, though annoyed that he gave me the command verbally. ‘Why did I learn to read?’ I demanded of him, ‘if you don’t bring written orders?’

‘You learned to read, Uhtred,’ he said happily, ‘to improve your mind, of course,’ then he saw Mildrith and his mouth began to open and close like a landed fish. ‘Is this?’ he began, and was struck dumb as a stick.

‘The Lady Mildrith,’ I said.

‘Dear lady,’ Beocca said, then gulped for air and twitched like a puppy wanting a pat. ‘I have known Uhtred,’ he managed to say to her, ‘since he was a little child! Since he was just a little child.’

‘He’s a big one now,’ Mildrith said, which Beocca thought was a wonderful jest for he giggled immoderately.

‘Why,’ I managed to stem his mirth, ‘am I going to Alfred?’

‘Because Halfdan is dead, God be praised, and no army will come from the north, God be praised, and so Guthrum seeks terms! The discussions have already started, and God be praised for that too.’ He beamed at me as though he was responsible for this rush of good news, and perhaps he was because he went on to say that Halfdan’s death was the result of prayers. ‘So many prayers, Uhtred. You see the power of prayer?’

‘God be praised indeed,’ Mildrith answered instead of me. She was indeed very pious, but no one is perfect. She was also pregnant, but Beocca did not notice and I did not tell him.

I left Mildrith in Hamtun, and rode with Beocca to the West Saxon army. A dozen of the king’s household troops served as our escort, for the route took us close to the northern shore of the Poole and Danish boats had been raiding that shore before the truce talks opened. ‘What does Alfred want of me?’ I asked Beocca constantly, insisting, despite his denials, that he must have some idea, but he claimed ignorance and in the end I stopped asking.

We arrived outside Werham on a chill autumn evening. Alfred was at his prayers in a tent that was serving as his royal chapel and Ealdorman Odda and his son waited outside and the Ealdorman gave me a guarded nod while his son ignored me. Beocca went into the tent to join the prayers while I squatted, drew Serpent-Breath and sharpened her with the whetstone I carried in my pouch.

‘Expecting to fight?’ Ealdorman Odda asked me sourly.

I looked at his son. ‘Maybe,’ I said, then looked back to the father. ‘You owe my wife money,’ I said, ‘eighteen shillings.’ He reddened, said nothing, though the son put a hand to his sword hilt and that made me smile and stand, Serpent-Breath’s naked blade already in my grip. Ealdorman Odda pulled his son angrily away. ‘Eighteen shillings!’ I called after them, then squatted again and ran the stone down the sword’s long edge.

Women. Men fight for them, and that was another lesson to learn. As a child I thought men struggled for land or for mastery, but they fight for women just as much. Mildrith and I were unexpectedly content together, but it was clear that Odda the Younger hated me because I had married her, and I wondered if he would dare do anything about that hatred. Beocca once told me the tale of a prince from a far away land who stole a king’s daughter and the king led his army to the prince’s land and thousands of great warriors died in the struggle to get her back. Thousands! And all for a woman. Indeed the argument that began this tale, the rivalry between King Osbert of Northumbria and Ælla, the man who wanted to be king, all began because Ælla stole Osbert’s wife. I have heard some women complain that they have no power and that men control the world, and so they do, but women still have the power to drive men to battle and to the grave beyond.

I was thinking of these things as Alfred came from the tent. He had the look of beatific pleasure he usually wore when he had just said his prayers, but he was also walking stiffly, which probably meant the ficus was troubling him again, and he looked distinctly uncomfortable when we sat down to supper that night. The meal was an unspeakable gruel I would hesitate to serve to pigs, but there was bread and cheese enough so I did not starve. I did note that Alfred was distant with me, hardly acknowledging my presence, and I put that down to the fleet’s failure to achieve any real victory during that summer, yet he had still summoned me and I wondered why if all he intended to do was ignore me.

Yet, next morning, he summoned me after prayers and we walked up and down outside the royal tent where the dragon banner flew in the autumn sun. ‘The fleet,’ Alfred said, frowning, ‘can it prevent the Danes leaving the Poole?’

‘No, lord.’

‘No?’ That was said sharply. ‘Why not?’

‘Because, lord,’ I said, ‘we have twelve ships and they have over two hundred. We could kill a few of them, but in the end they’ll overwhelm us and you won’t have any fleet left and they’ll still have more than two hundred ships.’

I think Alfred knew that, but he still did not like my answer. He grimaced, then walked in silence for a few more paces. ‘I am glad you married,’ he said abruptly.

‘To a debt,’ I said sharply.

He did not like my tone, but allowed it. ‘The debt, Uhtred,’ he said reprovingly, ‘is to the church, so you must welcome it. Besides, you’re young, you have time to pay. The Lord, remember, loves a cheerful giver.’ That was one of his favourite sayings and if I heard it once I heard it a thousand times. He turned on his heel, then looked back. ‘I shall expect your presence at the negotiations,’ he said, but did not explain why, nor wait for any response, but just walked on.

He and Guthrum were talking. A canopy had been raised between Alfred’s camp and Werham’s western wall, and it was beneath that shelter that a truce was being hammered out. Alfred would have liked to assault Werham, but the approach was narrow, the wall high and in very good repair, and the Danes were numerous. It would have been a very risky fight, and one that the Danes could expect to win, and so Alfred had abandoned the idea. As for the Danes, they were trapped. They had been relying on Halfdan coming to attack Alfred in the rear, but Halfdan was dead in Ireland, and Guthrum’s men were too many to be carried away on their ships, big as their fleet was, and if they tried to break out by land they would be forced to fight Alfred on the narrow strip of land between the two rivers, and that would cause a great slaughter. I remembered Ravn telling me how the Danes feared to lose too many men for they could not replace them quickly. Guthrum could stay where he was, of course, but then Alfred would besiege him and Alfred had already ordered that every barn, granary or store-house within raiding distance of the Poole was to be emptied. The Danes would starve in the coming winter.

Which meant that both sides wanted peace, and Alfred and Guthrum had been discussing terms, and I arrived just as they were finishing the discussions. It was already too late in the year for the Danish fleet to risk a long journey around Wessex’s southern coast, and so Alfred had agreed that Guthrum could remain in Werham through the winter. He also agreed to supply them with food on condition that they made no raids, and he agreed to give them silver because he knew the Danes always wanted silver, and in return they promised that they would stay peaceably in Werham and leave peaceably in the spring when their fleet would go back to East Anglia and the rest of their army would march north through Wessex, guarded by our men, until they reached Mercia.

No one, on either side, believed the promises, so they had to be secured, and for that each side demanded hostages, and the hostages had to be of rank, or else their lives would be security for nothing. A dozen Danish Earls, none of whom I knew, were to be delivered to Alfred, and an equivalent number of English nobles given to Guthrum.

Which was why I had been summoned. Which was why Alfred had been so distant with me, for he knew all along that I was to be one of the hostages. My use to him had lessened that year, because of the fleet’s impotence, but my rank still had bargaining power, and so I was among the chosen. I was Ealdorman Uhtred, and only useful because I was a noble, and I saw Odda the Younger smiling broadly as my name was accepted by the Danes.

Guthrum and Alfred then swore oaths. Alfred insisted that the Danish leader made his oath with one hand on the relics that Alfred always carried in his baggage. There was a feather from the dove that Noah had released from the ark, a glove that had belonged to Saint Cedd and, most sacred of all, a toe-ring that had belonged to Mary Magdalene. The holy ring, Alfred called it, and a bemused Guthrum put his hand on the scrap of gold and swore he would keep his promises, then insisted that Alfred put a hand on the bone he hung in his hair and he made the King of Wessex swear on a dead Danish mother that the West Saxons would keep the treaty. Only when those oaths were made, sanctified by the gold of a saint and the bone of a mother, were the hostages exchanged, and as I walked across the space between the two sides Guthrum must have recognised me for he gave me a long, contemplative look, and then we were escorted, with ceremony, to Werham.

Where Earl Ragnar, son of Ragnar, welcomed me.

There was joy in that meeting. Ragnar and I embraced like brothers, and I thought of him as a brother, and he thumped my back, poured ale, and gave me news. Kjartan and Sven still lived and were still in Dunholm. Ragnar had confronted them in a formal meeting where both sides were forbidden to carry weapons, and Kjartan had sworn that he was innocent of the hall-burning and declared he knew nothing of Thyra. ‘The bastard lied,’ Ragnar told me, ‘and I know he lied. And he knows he will die.’

‘But not yet?’

‘How can I take Dunholm?’

Brida was there, sharing Ragnar’s bed, and she greeted me warmly, though not as hotly as Nihtgenga who leaped all over me and washed my face with his tongue. Brida was amused that I was going to be a father. ‘But it will be good for you,’ she said.

‘Good for me? Why?’

‘Because you’ll be a proper man.’

I thought I was that already, yet there was still one thing lacking, one thing I had never confessed to anyone, not to Mildrith, not to Leofric, and not now to Ragnar or Brida. I had fought the Danes, I had seen ships burn and watched men drown, but I had never fought in a great shield wall. I had fought in small ones, I had fought ship’s crew against ship’s crew, but I had never stood on a wide battlefield and watched the enemy’s banners hide the sun, and known the fear that comes when hundreds or thousands of men are coming to the slaughter. I had been at Eoferwic and at Æsc’s Hill and I had seen the shield walls clash, but I had not been in the front rank. I had been in fights, but they had all been small and small fights end quickly. I had never endured the long blood-letting, the terrible fights when thirst and weariness weaken a man and the enemy, no matter how many you kill, keeps on coming. Only when I had done that, I thought, could I call myself a proper man.

I missed Mildrith, and that surprised me. I also missed Leofric, though there was huge pleasure in Ragnar’s company, and the life of a hostage was not hard. We lived in Werham, received enough food and watched the grey of winter shorten the days. One of the hostages was a cousin of Alfred’s, a priest called Wælla, who fretted and sometimes wept, but the rest of us were content enough. Hacca, who had once commanded Alfred’s fleet, was among the hostages, and he was the only one I knew well, but I spent my time with Ragnar and his men who accepted me as one of them and even tried to make me a Dane again. ‘I have a wife,’ I told them.

‘So bring her!’ Ragnar said. ‘We never have enough women.’

But I was English now. I did not hate the Danes, indeed I preferred their company to the company of the other hostages, but I was English. That journey was done. Alfred had not changed my allegiance, but Leofric and Mildrith had, or else the three spinners had become bored with teasing me, though Bebbanburg still haunted me and I did not know how, if I was to keep my loyalty to Alfred, I would ever see that lovely place again.

Ragnar accepted my choice. ‘But if there’s peace,’ he said, ‘will you help me fight Kjartan?’

‘If?’ I repeated the word.

He shrugged. ‘Guthrum still wants Wessex. We all do.’

‘If there’s peace,’ I promised, ‘I will come north.’

Yet I doubted there would be peace. In the spring Guthrum would leave Wessex, the hostages would be freed, and then what? The Danish army still existed and Ubba yet lived, so the onslaught on Wessex must begin again, and Guthrum must have been thinking the same for he talked with all the hostages in an effort to discover Alfred’s strength. ‘It is a great strength,’ I told him, ‘you may kill his army and another will spring up.’ It was all nonsense, of course, but what else did he expect me to say?

I doubt I convinced Guthrum, but Wælla, the priest who was Alfred’s cousin, put the fear of God into him. Guthrum spent hours talking with Wælla, and I often interpreted for him, and Guthrum was not asking about troops or ships, but about God. Who was the Christian god? What did he offer? He was fascinated by the tale of the crucifixion and I think, had we been given time enough, Wælla could even have persuaded Guthrum to convert. Wælla certainly thought so himself for he enjoined me to pray for such a conversion. ‘It’s close, Uhtred,’ he told me excitedly, ‘and once he has been baptised then there will be peace!’

Such are the dreams of priests. My dreams were of Mildrith and the child she carried. Ragnar dreamed of revenge. And Guthrum?

Despite his fascination with Christianity, Guthrum dreamed of just one thing.

He dreamed of war.