Death of Kings

Six

Alfred lay swathed in woollen blankets and propped against a great cushion. Osferth sat on the bed, his hand held by his father. The king’s other hand lay on a bejewelled book, I assumed a gospel book. Just outside the room, in a long passageway, Brother John and four members of his choir were singing a doleful chant. The room stank, despite the herbs scattered on the floor and the great candles that burned in tall wooden sticks. Some of them were Alfred’s prized candle clocks, their bands marking the hours as the king’s life leaked away. Two priests stood against one wall of Alfred’s chamber, while opposite them was a great panel of leather on which the crucifixion was painted.

Steapa pushed me into the room and shut the door on me.

Alfred looked dead already. Indeed, I might have thought him a corpse if he had not pulled his hand away from Osferth, who was in tears. The king’s long face was pale as fleece, with sunken eyes, sunken cheeks and dark shadows. His hair had thinned and gone white. His gums had pulled back from his remaining teeth, his unshaven chin was stained with spittle, while the hand on the book was mere skin-covered bones on which a great ruby shone, the ring too big now for his skeletal finger. His breath was shallow, though his voice was remarkably strong. ‘Behold the sword of the Saxons,’ he greeted me.

‘I see your son has a loose tongue, lord King,’ I said. I went onto one knee until he feebly gestured for me to stand.

He looked at me from his pillow and I looked at him and the monks chanted beyond the door and a candle guttered to spew a thick twist of smoke. ‘I’m dying, Lord Uhtred,’ Alfred said.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘And you look healthy as a bullock,’ he said with a grimace that was meant to be a smile. ‘You always had the capacity to irritate me, didn’t you? It isn’t tactful to look healthy in front of a dying king, but I rejoice for you.’ His left hand stroked the gospel book. ‘Tell me what will happen when I’m dead,’ he commanded me.

‘Your son Edward will rule, lord.’

He gazed at me and I saw the intelligence in those sunken eyes. ‘Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear,’ he said with a touch of his old asperity, ‘but what you believe.’

‘Your son Edward will rule, lord,’ I repeated.

He nodded slowly, believing me. ‘He’s a good son,’ Alfred said, almost as if he were trying to persuade himself of that.

‘He fought well at Beamfleot. You would have been proud of him, lord.’

Alfred nodded tiredly. ‘So much is expected of a king,’ he said. ‘He must be brave in battle, wise in council, just in judgement.’

‘You have been all those things, lord,’ I said, not flattering him, but telling the truth.

‘I tried,’ he said, ‘God knows I did try.’ He closed his eyes and was silent for so long that I wondered if he had fallen asleep and whether I should leave, but then his eyes opened and he gazed at the smoke-darkened ceiling. Somewhere deep in the palace a hound barked shrilly, then suddenly stopped. Alfred frowned in thought, then turned his head to look at me. ‘You spent time with Edward last summer,’ he said.

‘I did, lord.’

‘Is he wise?’

‘He’s clever, lord,’ I said.

‘Many folk are clever, Lord Uhtred, but very few are wise.’

‘Men learn wisdom through experience, lord,’ I said.

‘Some do,’ Alfred said tartly, ‘but will Edward learn?’ I shrugged because it was not a question I could answer. ‘I worry,’ Alfred said, ‘that his passions will rule him.’

I glanced at Osferth. ‘As yours ruled you, lord, once.’

‘Omnes enim peccaverunt,’ Alfred said softly.

‘All have sinned,’ Osferth translated and received a smile from his father.

‘I worry that he is headstrong,’ Alfred said, talking of Edward again. I was surprised that he talked so openly of his heir, but of course it was the one thing that preyed on his mind in those last days. Alfred had dedicated his life to the preservation of Wessex, and he desperately wanted reassurance that all his achievements would not be thrown away by his successor, and so deep was that worry that he could not let the subject alone. He wanted that reassurance so badly.

‘You leave him with good counsel, lord,’ I said, not because I believed it, but because he wanted to hear it. Many men of the Witan were indeed good counsellors, but there were too many churchmen like Plegmund, whose advice I would never trust.

‘And a king can reject all counsel,’ Alfred said, ‘because in the end it is always the king’s decision, it is the king’s responsibility, it is the king who is wise or foolish. And if the king is foolish, what will happen to the kingdom?’

‘You worry, lord,’ I said, ‘because Edward did what all young men do.’

‘He is not like other young men,’ Alfred said sternly, ‘but born to privilege and duty.’

‘And a girl’s smile,’ I said, ‘can erode duty faster than flame melts frost.’

He stared at me. ‘So you know?’ he said, after a long while.

‘Yes, lord, I know.’

Alfred sighed. ‘He said it was passion, that it was love. Kings don’t marry for love, Lord Uhtred, they marry to make their kingdom safe. And she wasn’t right,’ he said firmly, ‘she was brazen! She was shameless!’

‘Then I wish I’d known her, lord,’ I said, and Alfred laughed, though the effort hurt him and the laugh turned to a groan. Osferth had no idea what we talked about and I gave him the slightest shake of my head to show that he should not ask, and then I thought of the words that would give Alfred the reassurance he wanted. ‘At Beamfleot, lord,’ I said, ‘I stood beside Edward in a shield wall and a man cannot hide his character in a shield wall, and I learned that your son is a good man. I promise you, he is a man to be proud of,’ I hesitated, then nodded at Osferth, ‘as are all your sons.’

I saw the king’s hand tighten on Osferth’s fingers. ‘Osferth is a good man,’ Alfred said, ‘and I am proud of him.’ Alfred patted his bastard son’s hand and looked back to me. ‘And what else will happen?’ he asked.

‘Æthelwold will make an attempt to take the throne,’ I said.

‘He swears not.’

‘He swears easily, lord. You should have cut his throat twenty years ago.’

‘People said the same about you, Lord Uhtred.’

‘Maybe you should have taken their advice, lord?’

His mouth showed the ghost of a smile. ‘Æthelwold is a sorry creature,’ he said, ‘without discipline or sense. He’s not a danger, just a reminder of our fallibility.’

‘He’s talked to Sigurd,’ I said, ‘and he has disaffected allies in both Cent and Mercia. That’s why I came to Wintanceaster, lord, to warn you of this.’

Alfred gazed at me for a long time, then sighed. ‘He’s always dreamed of being king,’ he said.

‘Time to kill him and his dream, lord,’ I said firmly. ‘Give me the word and I’ll rid you of him.’

Alfred shook his head. ‘He’s my brother’s son,’ Alfred said, ‘and a weak man. I don’t want my family’s blood on my hands when I stand before God at the judgement seat.’

‘So you let him live?’

‘He’s too weak to be dangerous. No one in Wessex will support him.’

‘Very few will, lord,’ I said, ‘so he’ll go back to Sigurd and Cnut. They will invade Mercia and then Wessex. There will be battles.’ I hesitated. ‘And in those battles, lord, Cnut, Sigurd and Æthelwold will die, but Edward and Wessex will be safe.’

He considered that glib statement for a moment, then sighed. ‘And Mercia? Not every man in Mercia loves Wessex.’

‘The Mercian lords must choose sides, lord,’ I said. ‘Those who support Wessex will be on the winning side, the others will be dead. Mercia will be ruled by Edward.’

I had told him what he wanted to hear, but also what I believed. Strange, that. I had been left confused by Ælfadell’s predictions, yet when I was asked to foretell the future I had no hesitation.

‘How can you be so sure?’ Alfred asked. ‘Did the witch Ælfadell tell you all that?’

‘No, lord. She told me the very opposite, but she was only telling me what Jarl Cnut wanted her to say.’

‘The gift of prophecy,’ Alfred said sternly, ‘would not be given to a pagan.’

‘Yet you ask me to tell the future, lord?’ I asked mischievously, and was rewarded by another grimace that was intended as a smile.

‘So how can you be sure?’ Alfred asked.

‘We’ve learned how to fight the Northmen, lord,’ I said, ‘but they haven’t learned how to fight us. When you have burhs, then the defender has all the advantages. They will attack, we will defend, they will lose, we shall win.’

‘You make it sound simple,’ Alfred said.

‘Battle is simple, lord, maybe that’s why I’m good at it.’

‘I have been wrong about you, Lord Uhtred.’

‘No, lord.’

‘No?’

‘I love the Danes, lord.’

‘But you are the sword of the Saxons?’

‘Wyrd bi ful ræd, lord,’ I said.

He closed his eyes momentarily. He lay so still that for a few heartbeats I feared he was dying, but then he opened his eyes again and frowned towards the smoke-blackened rafters. He tried to suppress a moan, but it escaped anyway and I saw the pain pass across his face. ‘That is so hard,’ he said.

‘There are potions that help with pain, lord,’ I said helplessly.

He shook his head slowly. ‘Not pain, Lord Uhtred. We are born to pain. No, fate is difficult. Is all ordained? Foreknowledge is not fate, and we may choose our paths, yet fate says we may not choose them. So if fate is real, do we have choice?’ I said nothing, letting him puzzle that unanswerable question for himself. He looked at me. ‘What would you have your fate be?’ he asked.

‘I would recapture Bebbanburg, lord, and when I find myself on my deathbed I want it to be in Bebbanburg’s high hall with the sound of her sea filling my ears.’

‘And I have Brother John filling my ears,’ Alfred said, amused. ‘He tells them they must open their mouths like hungry little birds, and they do.’ He put his right hand back on Osferth’s hand. ‘They want me to be a hungry little bird. They feed me thin gruel, Lord Uhtred, and insist that I eat, but I don’t want to eat.’ He sighed. ‘My son,’ he meant Osferth, ‘tells me you are a poor man. Why? Did you not capture a fortune at Dunholm?’

‘I did, lord.’

‘You wasted it?’

‘I wasted it in your service, lord, on men, mail and weapons. On guarding the frontier of Mercia. On equipping an army to defeat Haesten.’

‘Nervi bellorum pecuniae,’ Alfred said.

‘Your scriptures, lord?’

‘A wise Roman, Lord Uhtred, who said that money is the sinews of war.’

‘He knew what he was talking about, lord.’

Alfred closed his eyes and I could see the pain cross his face again. His mouth tightened as he suppressed a groan. The smell in the room grew ranker. ‘There is a lump in my belly,’ he said, ‘like a stone.’ He paused and again tried to stifle a groan. A single tear escaped. ‘I watch the candle clocks,’ he said, ‘and wonder how many bands will burn before,’ he hesitated. ‘I measure my life by inches. You will come back tomorrow, Lord Uhtred.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘I have given my,’ he paused, then patted Osferth’s hand, ‘my son,’ he said, ‘a charge.’ He opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘My son is charged with converting you to the true faith.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said, not knowing what else to say. I saw the tears on Osferth’s face.

Alfred looked at the great leather panel that showed the crucifixion. ‘Do you notice anything strange about that painting?’ he asked me.

I stared at it. Jesus hung from the cross, blood streaked, the sinews in his arms stretching against the dark sky behind. ‘No, lord,’ I said.

‘He’s dying,’ Alfred said. That seemed obvious and so I said nothing. ‘In every other depiction I have seen of our Lord’s death,’ the king went on, ‘he is smiling on the cross, but not in this one. In this painting his head is hanging, he is in pain.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Archbishop Plegmund reproved the painter,’ Alfred said, ‘because he believes our Lord conquered pain and so would have smiled to the end, but I like the painting. It reminds me that my pain is as nothing compared to his.’

‘I would you had no pain, lord,’ I said awkwardly.

He ignored that. He still gazed at the agonised Christ, then grimaced. ‘He wore a crown of thorns,’ he said in a tone of wonderment. ‘Men want to be king,’ he went on, ‘but every crown has thorns. I told Edward that wearing the crown is hard, so hard. One last thing,’ he turned his head from the painting and raised his left hand, and I saw what an effort it took to lift that pathetic hand from the gospel book. ‘I would have you swear an oath of loyalty to Edward. That way I can die in the knowledge that you will fight for us.’

‘I will fight for Wessex,’ I said.

‘The oath,’ he said sternly.

‘And I will give an oath,’ I said. His shrewd eyes stared at me.

‘To my daughter?’ he asked, and I saw Osferth stiffen.

‘To your daughter, lord,’ I agreed.

He seemed to shudder. ‘In my laws, Lord Uhtred, adultery is not just a sin, but a crime.’

‘You would make criminals of all mankind, lord.’

He half smiled at that. ‘I love Æthelflaed,’ he said, ‘she was always the liveliest of my children, but not the most obedient.’ His hand dropped back onto the gospel book. ‘Leave me now, Lord Uhtred. Come back tomorrow.’

If he was still alive, I thought. I knelt to him, then Osferth and I left. We walked in silence to a cloistered courtyard where the last roses of summer had dropped their petals on the damp grass. We sat on a stone bench and listened to the mournful chants echoing from the passageway. ‘The archbishop wanted me dead,’ I said.

‘I know,’ Osferth said, ‘so I went to my father.’

‘I’m surprised they let you see him.’

‘I had to argue with the priests who guard him,’ he said with a half-smile, ‘but he heard the argument.’

‘And called you to see him?’

‘He sent a priest to summon me.’

‘And you told him what was happening to me?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And you made your peace with Alfred?’

Osferth gazed unseeing into the dark. ‘He said he was sorry, lord, that I am what I am, and that it was his fault, and that he would intervene for me in heaven.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said, not sure how else to respond to such nonsense.

‘And I told him, lord, that if Edward were to rule, then Edward needed you.’

‘Edward will rule,’ I said, then I told him about the Lady Ecgwynn and the twin babies hidden away in the nunnery. ‘Edward was only doing what his father did,’ I said, ‘but it will cause problems.’

‘Problems?’

‘Are the babies legitimate?’ I asked. ‘Alfred says not, but once Alfred dies then Edward can declare otherwise.’

‘Oh, God,’ Osferth said, seeing the difficulties so far in the future.

‘What they should do, of course,’ I said, ‘is strangle the little bastards.’

‘Lord!’ Osferth said, shocked.

‘But they won’t. Your family was never ruthless enough.’

It had begun to rain harder, the drops beating on the tile and thatch of the palace roofs. There was no moon, no stars, only clouds in darkness and the hard rain teeming and the wind sighing about the scaffolded tower of Alfred’s great new church. I went to Saint Hedda’s. The guards were gone, the alleyway dark, and I beat on the convent door till someone answered.

Next day the king and his bed had been moved to the larger hall where Plegmund and his colleagues had thought to condemn me. The crown was on the bed, its bright emeralds reflecting the fire that filled the high chamber with smoke and heat. The room was crowded, stinking of men and the king’s decay. Bishop Asser was there, as was Erkenwald, though the archbishop had evidently found other business to keep him from the king’s presence. A score of West Saxon lords were there. One of them was Æthelhelm whose daughter was to marry Edward. I liked Æthelhelm, who now stood close behind Ælswith, Alfred’s wife, who did not know which she resented more, my existence or the strange truth that Wessex did not recognise the rank of queen. She watched me balefully. Her children flanked her. Æthelflaed, at twenty-nine, was the eldest, then came her brother, Edward, then Æthelgifu and lastly Æthelweard who was just sixteen. Ælfthryth, Alfred’s third daughter, was not there because she had been married to a king across the water in Frankia. Steapa was there, looming above my dear old friend, Father Beocca, who was now stooped and white-haired. Brother John and his monks sang softly. Not all of the choir were monks, some were small boys robed in pale linen and, with a shock, I recognised my son Uhtred as one of them.

I have been, I confess, a bad father. I loved my two youngest children, but my eldest who, in the tradition of my family, had taken my name, was a mystery. Instead of wishing to learn sword-craft and spear-skill, he had become a Christian. A Christian! And now, with the other boys of the cathedral choir, he sang like a little bird. I glared at him, but he resolutely avoided my gaze.

I joined the ealdormen who stood at one side of the hall. They, with the senior clerics, formed the king’s council, the Witan, and they had business to discuss, though none did it with any enthusiasm. A grant of land was given to a monastery, and payment authorised for the masons who were working on Alfred’s new church. A man who had failed to pay his fine for the crime of manslaughter was pardoned because he had done good service with Weohstan’s forces at Beamfleot. Some men looked at me when that victory was mentioned, but no one asked if I remembered the man. The king took little part, except to raise a weary hand to signify his assent.

All this while a clerk was standing behind a desk where he wrote a manuscript. I thought at first he was making a record of the proceedings, but two other clerks were clearly doing that, while the man at the desk was mainly copying from another document. He seemed very conscious of everyone’s gaze and was red in the face, though perhaps that was the heat from the great fire. Bishop Asser was scowling, Ælswith looked ready to kill me with anger, but Father Beocca was smiling. He bobbed his head to me and I winked at him. Æthelflaed caught my eye and smiled so mischievously that I hoped her father had not seen it. Her husband was standing not far away from her and, like my son, he studiously avoided my gaze. Then, to my astonishment, I saw Æthelwold standing at the back of the hall. He looked at me defiantly, but could not hold my stare and stooped instead to talk with a companion I did not recognise.

A man complained that his neighbour, Ealdorman Æthelnoth, had taken fields that did not belong to him. The king interrupted the complaint, whispering to Bishop Asser who gave the king’s judgement. ‘Will you accept the arbitration of Abbot Osburh?’ he asked the man.

‘I will.’

‘And you, Lord Æthelnoth?’

‘Gladly.’

‘Then the abbot is charged with discovering the boundaries according to the proper writs,’ Asser said, and the clerks scratched his words, and the council moved on to discuss other matters and I saw Alfred look wearily towards the man copying the document at the desk. The man had finished, because he sanded the parchment, waited a few heartbeats and then blew the sand into the fire. He folded the parchment and wrote something on the folded side, then sanded and blew again. A second clerk brought a candle, wax and a seal. The finished document was then carried to the king’s bed, and Alfred, with great effort, signed his name and then beckoned that Bishop Erkenwald and Father Beocca should add their signatures as witnesses to whatever it was he had signed.

The council fell silent as this was done. I assumed the document was the king’s will, but once the wax had been impressed with the great seal, the king beckoned to me.

I went to his bedside and knelt. ‘I have been granting small gifts as remembrances,’ Alfred said.

‘You were ever generous, lord King,’ I lied, but what else does one say to a dying man?

‘This is for you,’ he said, and I heard Ælswith’s sharp intake of breath as I took the newly written parchment from her husband’s feeble hand. ‘Read it,’ he said, ‘you can still read?’

‘Father Beocca taught me well,’ I said.

‘Father Beocca does all things well,’ the king said, then moaned with pain, which caused a monk to go to his side and offer him a cup.

The king sipped, and I read. It was a charter. The clerk had copied much of it, for one charter is much like another, but this one took my breath away. It granted me land, and the grant was not conditional, like that which Alfred had once used to give me an estate at Fifhiden. Instead it conveyed the land freely to me and to my heirs or to whoever else I chose to grant that land, and the charter laboriously described the boundaries of the land, and the length of that description told me that the estate was wide and deep. There was a river and orchards and meadows and villages, and a hall at a place called Fagranforda, and all of it in Mercia. ‘The land belonged to my father,’ Alfred said.

I did not know what to say, except to utter thanks.

The feeble hand stretched towards me and I took it. I kissed the ruby. ‘You know what I want,’ Alfred said. I kept my head bowed over his hand. ‘The land is given freely,’ he said, ‘and it will give you wealth, much wealth.’

‘Lord King,’ I said, and my voice faltered.

His feeble fingers tightened on my hand. ‘Give something back to me, Uhtred,’ he said, ‘give me peace before I die.’

And so I did what he wanted, and what I did not wish to do, but he was dying, and he had been generous at the end, and how can you slap a man who is in his last days of life? And so I went to Edward and I knelt to him, and I put my hands between his and I swore the oath of loyalty. And some in the hall applauded while some stayed resolutely silent. Æthelhelm, the chief adviser in the Witan, smiled, for he knew I would now fight for Wessex. My cousin Æthelred shuddered, for he knew he would never call himself king in Mercia so long as I did Edward’s will, while Æthelwold must have wondered if he would ever take Alfred’s throne if he had to fight his way past Serpent-Breath. Edward pulled me to my feet and embraced me. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered. That was Wednesday, Woden’s Day, in October, the eighth month of the year, which was 899.

The next day belonged to Thor. The rain did not stop, coming in huge swathes that swept across Wintanceaster. ‘Heaven itself is weeping,’ Beocca told me. He was crying himself. ‘The king asked me to give him the last rites,’ he said, ‘and I did, but my hands were shaking.’ It seemed Alfred received the last rites at intervals through the day, so intent was he on making a good end, and the priests and bishops vied with each other for the honour of anointing the king and placing a piece of dry bread between his lips. ‘Bishop Asser was ready to give the viaticum,’ Beocca said, ‘but Alfred asked for me.’

‘He loves you,’ I said, ‘and you’ve served him well.’

‘I have served God and the king,’ Beocca said, then let me guide him to a seat beside the fire in the great room of the Two Cranes. ‘He took some curds this morning,’ Beocca told me earnestly, ‘but not many. Two spoonfuls.’

‘He doesn’t want to eat,’ I said.

‘He must,’ Beocca said. Poor dear Beocca. He had been my father’s priest and clerk, and my childhood tutor, though he had abandoned Bebbanburg when my uncle usurped its lordship. He was low-born and ill-born, with a pathetic squint, a misshapen nose, a palsied left hand and a club foot. It was my grandfather who saw the boy’s cleverness and had him educated by the monks at Lindisfarena, and Beocca became a priest and then, following my uncle’s treachery, an exile. His cleverness and his devotion had attracted Alfred, whom Beocca had served ever since. He was old now, almost as old as the king, and his straggly red hair had turned white, his back was bent, yet he still had a keen mind and a strong will. He also had a Danish wife, a true beauty, who was the sister of my dearest friend, Ragnar.

‘How is Thyra?’ I asked him.

‘She is well, thanks be to God, and the boys! We’re blessed.’

‘You’ll be blessed and dead if you insist on walking the streets in this rain,’ I said. ‘No fool like an old fool.’

He chuckled at that, then made a small impotent protest when I insisted on taking his sopping wet cloak and placing a dry one around his shoulders. ‘The king asked me to come to you,’ he said.

‘Then the king should have told me to go to you,’ I said.

‘Such a wet season!’ Beocca said. ‘I haven’t seen rain like this since the year Archbishop Æthelred died. The king doesn’t know it’s raining. Poor man. He strives against the pain. He can’t last long now.’

‘And he sent you,’ I reminded him.

‘He asks a favour of you,’ Beocca said, with a touch of his old sternness.

‘Go on.’

‘Fagranforda is a great estate,’ Beocca said, ‘the king was generous.’

‘I have been generous to him,’ I said.

Beocca waved his crippled left hand as if to dismiss my remark. ‘There are presently four churches and a monastery on the estate,’ he went on crisply, ‘and the king has asked for your assurance that you will maintain them as they should be maintained, as their charters demand, and as is your duty.’

I smiled at that. ‘And if I refuse?’

‘Oh please, Uhtred,’ he said wearily. ‘I have struggled with you my whole life!’

‘I will tell the steward to do all that is necessary,’ I promised.

He looked at me with his one good eye as if judging my sincerity, but seemed pleased with what he saw. ‘The king will be grateful,’ he said.

‘I thought you were going to ask me to abandon Æthelflaed,’ I said mischievously. There were few people I would ever talk to about Æthelflaed, but Beocca, who had known me since I was a stripling, was one.

He shuddered at my words. ‘Adultery is a grievous sin,’ he said, though without much passion.

‘A crime too,’ I said, amused. ‘Have you told that to Edward?’

He flinched. ‘That was a young man’s foolishness,’ he said, ‘and God punished the girl. She died.’

‘Your god is so good,’ I said caustically, ‘but why didn’t he think to kill her royal bastards as well?’

‘They have been put away,’ he said.

‘With Æthelflaed.’

He nodded. ‘They kept her from you,’ he said, ‘you know that?’

‘I know that.’

‘Locked her away in Saint Hedda’s,’ he said.

‘I found the key,’ I said.

‘God preserve us from wickedness,’ Beocca said, making the sign of the cross. ‘Æthelflaed,’ I said, ‘is loved in Mercia. Her husband is not.’

‘This is known,’ he said distantly.

‘When Edward becomes king,’ I said, ‘he will look to Mercia.’

‘Look to Mercia?’

‘The Danes will come, father,’ I said, ‘and they’ll begin with Mercia. You want the Mercian lords fighting for Wessex? You want the Mercian fyrd fighting for Wessex? The one person who can inspire them is Æthelflaed.’

‘You can,’ he said loyally.

I gave that statement the scorn it deserved. ‘You and I are Northumbrians, father. They think we’re barbarians who eat our children for breakfast. But they love Æthelflaed.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘So let her be a sinner, father, if that is what makes Wessex safe.’

‘Am I supposed to tell the king that?’

I laughed. ‘You’re supposed to tell Edward that. And tell him more. Tell him to kill Æthelwold. No mercy, no family sentimentality, no Christian guilt. Just give me the order and he’s dead.’

Beocca shook his head. ‘Æthelwold is a fool,’ he said accurately, ‘and most of the time a drunken fool. He flirted with the Danes, we cannot deny it, but he has confessed all his sins to the king and been forgiven.’

‘Forgiven?’

‘Last night,’ Beocca said, ‘he shed tears at the king’s bedside and swore allegiance to the king’s heir.’

I had to laugh. Alfred’s response to my warning had been to summon Æthelwold and believe the fool’s lies. ‘Æthelwold will try to take the throne,’ I said.

‘He swore the opposite,’ Beocca said earnestly, ‘he swore on Noah’s feather and on the glove of Saint Cedd.’

The feather had supposedly belonged to a dove that Noah had released from the ark back in the days when it rained as heavily as the downpour that now drummed on the roof of the Two Cranes. The feather and the saint’s glove were two of Alfred’s most precious relics, and doubtless he would believe anything that was sworn in their presence. ‘Don’t believe him,’ I said, ‘kill him. Or else he’ll make trouble.’

‘He has sworn his oath,’ Beocca said, ‘and the king believes him.’

‘Æthelwold is a treacherous earsling,’ I said.

‘He’s just a fool,’ Beocca said dismissively.

‘But an ambitious fool, and a fool with a legitimate claim to the throne, and men will use that claim.’

‘He has relented, he has made confession, he has been absolved, and he is penitent.’

What fools we all are. I see the same mistakes being made, time after time, generation after generation, yet still we go on believing what we wish to believe. That night, in the wet darkness, I repeated Beocca’s words. ‘He has relented,’ I said, ‘he has made confession, he has been absolved, and he is penitent.’

‘And they believe him?’ Æthelflaed asked bleakly.

‘Christians are fools,’ I said, ‘ready to believe anything.’

She prodded me hard in the ribs, and I chuckled. The rain fell on Saint Hedda’s roof. I should not have been there, of course, but the abbess, dear Hild, pretended not to know. I was not in that part of the nunnery where the sisters lived in seclusion, but in a range of buildings about the outer courtyard where lay folk were permitted. There were kitchens where food was prepared for the poor, there was a hospital where the indigent could die, and there was this attic room, which had been Æthelflaed’s prison. It was not uncomfortable, though small. She was attended by maidservants, but this night they had been told to make themselves beds in the storerooms beneath. ‘They told me you were negotiating with the Danes,’ Æthelflaed said.

‘I was. I was using Serpent-Breath.’

‘And negotiating with Sigunn too?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and she’s well.’

‘God knows why I love you.’

‘God knows everything.’

She said nothing to that, but just stirred beside me and pulled the fleece higher about her head and shoulders. The rain beat on. Her hair was golden in my face. She was Alfred’s eldest child and I had watched her grow to become a woman, had watched the joy in her face fade to bitterness when she was given as wife to my cousin, and I had seen the joy return. Her blue eyes were flecked with brown, her nose was small and upturned. It was a face I loved, but a face that now had lines of worry. ‘You should talk to your son,’ she said, her voice muffled by the fleece bedcover.

‘Uhtred spouts pious nonsense to me,’ I said, ‘so I’d rather talk to my daughter.’

‘She’s safe, and your other son too, in Cippanhamm.’

‘Why is Uhtred here?’ I asked.

‘The king wanted him here.’

‘They’re turning him into a priest,’ I said angrily.

‘And they want to turn me into a nun,’ she said just as angrily. ‘They do?’

‘Bishop Erkenwald administered the oath to me, I spat at him.’

I pulled her head out from under the fleece. ‘They really tried?’

‘Bishop Erkenwald and my mother.’

‘What happened?’

‘They came here,’ she said in a very matter-of-fact voice, ‘and insisted I went to the chapel, and Bishop Erkenwald said a great deal of angry Latin, then held a book to me and told me to put my hand on it and swear to keep the oath he’d just said.’

‘And you did?’

‘I told you what I did. I spat at him.’

I lay in silence for a while. ‘Æthelred must have persuaded them,’ I said.

‘Well I’m sure he’d like to put me away, but Mother said it was Father’s wish I took the vows.’

‘I doubt that,’ I said.

‘So then they went back to the palace and announced I had taken the vow.’

‘And put guards on the gate,’ I said.

‘I think that was to keep you out,’ Æthelflaed said, ‘but you say the guards are gone?’

‘They’re gone.’

‘So I can leave?’

‘You left yesterday.’

‘Steapa’s men escorted me to the palace,’ she said, ‘then brought me back here.’

‘There are no guards now.’

She frowned in thought. ‘I should have been born a man.’

‘I’m glad you weren’t.’

‘And I would be king,’ she said.

‘Edward will be a good king.’

‘He will,’ she agreed, ‘but he can be indecisive. I would have made a better king.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you would.’

‘Poor Edward,’ she said.

‘Poor? He’ll be king soon.’

‘He lost his love,’ she said.

‘And the babies live.’

‘The babies live,’ she agreed.

I think I loved Gisela best of all the women in my life. I mourn her still. But of all those women, Æthelflaed was always the closest. She thought like me. I would sometimes start to say something and she would finish the sentence. In time we just looked at each other and knew what the other was thinking. Of all the friends I have made in my life, I loved Æthelflaed the best.

Sometime in that wet darkness, Thor’s Day turned into Freya’s Day. Freya was Woden’s wife, the goddess of love, and for all of her day the rain continued to fall. A wind rose in the afternoon, a high wind that tore at Wintanceaster’s thatch and drove the rain in malevolent spite, and that same night King Alfred, who had ruled in Wessex for twenty-eight years and was in the fiftieth year of his life, died.

The next morning there was no rain and little wind. Wintanceaster was silent, except for the pigs rooting in the streets, the cockerels crowing, the dogs howling or barking and the thud of the sentries’ boots on the waterlogged planks of the ramparts. Folk seemed dazed. A bell began to toll in mid-morning, just a single bell struck again and again, and the sound faded down the river valley where floods sheeted the meadows, then came again with brutal force. The king is dead, long live the king.

Æthelflaed wanted to pray in the nuns’ chapel, and I left her in Saint Hedda’s and walked through the silent streets to the palace where I surrendered my sword at the gatehouse and saw Steapa sitting alone in the outer courtyard. His grim, skin-stretched face that had terrified so many of Alfred’s enemies was wet with tears. I sat on the bench beside him, but said nothing. A woman hurried past carrying a stack of folded linens. The king dies, yet still sheets must be washed, rooms swept, ashes thrown out, wood stacked, grain milled. A score of horses had been saddled and were waiting at the courtyard’s farther end. I supposed they were for messengers who would carry the news of the king’s death to every corner of his kingdom, but instead a troop of men, all in mail and all helmeted, appeared from a doorway and were helped up into their saddles. ‘Your men?’ I asked Steapa.

He gave them a sour glance. ‘Not mine.’

They were Æthelwold’s men. Æthelwold himself was the last to appear and, like his followers, he was dressed for war in a helmet and mail. Three servants had brought the troops’ swords from the gatehouse and men milled about in search of their own blade, then strapped the swords and belts about their waists. Æthelwold took his own long-sword, let a servant buckle the belt, then was helped up onto his horse, a big black stallion. He saw me then. He kicked the horse towards me and pulled the blade out of its scabbard. I did not move, and he curbed the stallion a few paces away. The horse flailed a hoof at the cobblestones, striking a spark. ‘A sad day, Lord Uhtred,’ Æthelwold said. The bare sword was at his side, pointing down. He wanted to use it and he dared not use it. He had ambition and he was weak.

I looked up into his long face, once so handsome, now ravaged by drink and anger and disappointment. There was grey at his temples. ‘A sad day, my prince,’ I agreed.

He was measuring me, measuring the distance his sword needed to travel, measuring the chance he would have to escape through the gate arch after striking the blow. He glanced around the courtyard to see how many of the royal bodyguard were in sight. There were only two. He could have struck me, let his followers take care of the two men, and be gone, all in a moment, but still he hesitated. One of his followers pushed his horse close. The man wore a helmet with closed cheek-plates, so all I could see of his face were his eyes. A shield was slung on his back and on it was painted the head of a bull with bloodied horns. His horse was nervous and he slapped its neck hard. I saw the scars on the beast’s flanks where he had used his spurs deep and hard. He leaned close to Æthelwold and said something under his breath, but was interrupted by Steapa, who simply stood up. He was a huge man, frighteningly tall and broad and, as commander of the royal bodyguard, permitted to wear his sword throughout the palace. He grasped his sword’s hilt and Æthelwold immediately pushed his own blade halfway back into its scabbard. ‘I was worried,’ he said, ‘that the damp weather would have rusted the sword. It seems not.’

‘You put fleece-grease on the blade?’ I asked.

‘My servant must,’ he said airily. He pushed the blade home. The man with the bloodied bull’s horns on his shield stared at me from the shadows of his helmet.

‘You’ll return for the funeral?’ I asked Æthelwold.

‘And for the coronation too,’ he said slyly, ‘but till then I have business at Tweoxnam.’ He offered me an unfriendly smile. ‘My estate there is not so large as yours at Fagranforda, Lord Uhtred, but large enough to need my attention in these sad days.’ He gathered the reins and rammed back his spurs so that the stallion leaped forward. His men followed, their horses’ hooves loud on the stone.

‘Who shows a bull’s head on his shield?’ I asked Steapa.

‘Sigebriht of Cent,’ Steapa said, watching the men disappear through the arch. ‘A young rich fool.’

‘Were they his followers? Or Æthelwold’s?’

‘Æthelwold has men,’ Steapa said. ‘He can afford them. He owns his father’s estates at Tweoxnam and Wimburnan, and that makes him wealthy.’

‘He should be dead.’

‘It’s family business,’ Steapa said, ‘nothing to do with you and me.’

‘It’s you and me who’ll be doing the killing for the family,’ I said.

‘I’m getting too old for it,’ he grumbled.

‘How old are you?’

‘No idea,’ he said, ‘forty?’

He led me through a small gate in the palace wall, then across a patch of waterlogged grass towards Alfred’s old church that stood beside the new minster. Scaffolding spider-webbed the sky where the great stone tower was unfinished. Townsfolk stood by the old church door. They did not speak, but stood and looked bereft, shuffling aside as Steapa and I approached. Some bowed. The door was guarded today by six of Steapa’s men, who pulled their spears aside when they saw us.

Steapa made the sign of the cross as we entered the old church. It was cold inside. The stone walls were painted with scenes from the Christian scriptures, while gold, silver and crystal glinted from the altars. A Dane’s dream, I thought, because there was enough treasure here to buy a fleet and fill it with swords. ‘He thought this church was too small,’ Steapa said in wonderment as he gazed up at the high roof beams. Birds flew there. ‘A falcon nested up there last year,’ he said.

The king had already been brought to the church and laid in front of the high altar. A harpist played and Brother John’s choir sang from the shadows. I wondered if my son was among them, but did not look. Priests muttered in front of side-altars or knelt beside the coffin where the king lay. Alfred’s eyes were closed and his face tied with a white cloth that compressed his lips between which I could just see a crust, presumably because a priest had placed a piece of the Christian’s holy bread in the dead man’s mouth. He was dressed in a penitent’s white robe, like the one he had once forced me to wear. That had been years before, when Æthelwold and I had been commanded to abase ourselves before an altar, and I had been given no choice but to agree, but Æthelwold had turned the whole miserable ceremony into farce. He had pretended to be full of remorse, and shouted that remorse to the sky, ‘No more tits, God! No more tits! Keep me from tits!’ and I remembered how Alfred had turned away in frustrated disgust.

‘Exanceaster,’ Steapa said.

‘You were remembering the same day,’ I said.

‘It was raining,’ he said, ‘and you had to crawl to the altar in the field. I remember.’

That had been the very first time I had seen Steapa, so baleful and frightening, and later we had fought and then become friends, and it was all such a long time ago, and I stood beside Alfred’s coffin and thought how life slipped by, and how, for nearly all my life, Alfred had been there like a great landmark. I had not liked him. I had struggled against him and for him, I had cursed him and thanked him, despised him and admired him. I hated his religion and its cold disapproving gaze, its malevolence that cloaked itself in pretended kindness, and its allegiance to a god who would drain the joy from the world by naming it sin, but Alfred’s religion had made him a good man and a good king.

And Alfred’s joyless soul had proved a rock against which the Danes had broken themselves. Time and again they had attacked, and time and again Alfred had out-thought them, and Wessex grew ever stronger and richer and all that was because of Alfred. We think of kings as privileged men who rule over us and have the freedom to make, break and flaunt the law, but Alfred was never above the law he loved to make. He saw his life as a duty to his god and to the people of Wessex and I have never seen a better king, and I doubt my sons, grandsons and their children’s children will ever see a better one. I never liked him, but I have never stopped admiring him. He was my king and all that I now have I owe to him. The food that I eat, the hall where I live and the swords of my men, all started with Alfred, who hated me at times, loved me at times, and was generous with me. He was a gold-giver.

Steapa had tears on his cheeks. Some of the priests kneeling about the coffin were openly weeping. ‘They’ll make a grave for him tonight,’ Steapa said, pointing towards the high altar that was heaped with the glittering reliquaries that Alfred had loved.

‘They’re burying him in here?’ I asked.

‘There’s a vault,’ he said, ‘but it has to be opened. Once the new church is finished he’ll be taken there.’

‘And the funeral is tomorrow?’

‘Maybe a week. They need time so folk can travel here.’

We stayed a long time in the church, greeting men who came to mourn, and at midday the new king arrived with a group of nobles. Edward was tall, long-faced, thin-lipped and had very black hair that he wore brushed back. He looked so young to me. He wore a blue robe that was belted with a gold-panelled strip of leather, and over it a black cape that hung to the floor. He wore no crown, for he was not yet crowned, but had a bronze circlet about his skull.

I recognised most of the ealdormen who accompanied him, Æthelnoth, Wilfrith and, of course, Edward’s future father-in-law, Æthelhelm, who walked beside Father Coenwulf who was Edward’s confessor and guardian. There was a half-dozen younger men I did not know, and then I saw my cousin, Æthelred, and he saw me at the same moment and checked. Edward, walking towards his father’s coffin, beckoned him on. Steapa and I both went down on one knee and stayed there as Edward knelt at the foot of his father’s coffin and put his hands together in prayer. His guard all knelt. No one spoke. The choir was chanting interminably as incense smoke drifted in the sun-shafted air.

Æthelred’s eyes were closed in pretend prayer. The look on his face was bitter and strangely aged, perhaps because he had been ill and was, as Alfred his father-in-law had been, prone to bouts of sickness. I watched him, wondering. He must have hoped that Alfred’s death would loosen the leash that tied Mercia to Wessex. He must have been hoping that there would be two coronations, one in Wessex and another in Mercia, and he must have known that Edward knew all that. What stood in his way was his wife, who was beloved in Mercia, and who he had tried to make powerless by immuring her in Saint Hedda’s convent, and the other obstacle was his wife’s lover.

‘Lord Uhtred,’ Edward had opened his eyes, though his hands were still clasped in prayer.

‘Lord?’ I asked.

‘You will stay for the burial?’

‘If you wish, lord.’

‘I do wish,’ he said.

‘And then you must go to your estate in Fagranforda,’ he went on. ‘I am sure you have much to do there.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘The Lord Æthelred,’ Edward spoke firmly and loudly, ‘will stay to counsel me for a few weeks. I have need of wise counsel and I can think of none more able to deliver it.’

That was a lie. A spavined idiot could give better counsel than Æthelred, but of course Edward did not want my cousin’s advice. He wanted Æthelred where he could see him, where it would be difficult for Æthelred to foment unrest, and he was sending me to Mercia because he trusted me to keep Mercia on the West Saxon leash. And because he knew that if I went to Mercia so would his sister. I kept a very straight face.

A sparrow flew in the high church roof and its dropping, wet and white, fell on Alfred’s dead face, spattering messily from his nose to his left cheek.

An omen so bad, so terrible, that every man about the coffin held his breath.

And just then one of Steapa’s guards came into the church and hurried up the long nave, but did not kneel. Instead he looked from Edward to Æthelred, and from Æthelred to me, and he seemed not to know what to say until Steapa growled at him to speak.

‘The Lady Æthelflaed,’ the man said.

‘What of her?’ Edward asked.

‘The Lord Æthelwold took her by force, lord, from the convent. Took her, lord. And they’ve gone.’

So the struggle for Wessex had begun.

Seven

Æthelred laughed. Perhaps it was a nervous reaction, but in that old church the sound echoed mockingly from the lower walls that were made of stone. When the sound died away all I could hear was water dripping onto the floor from the rain-soaked thatch.

Edward looked at me, then at Æthelred, finally at Æthelhelm. He appeared confused.

‘Where did Lord Æthelwold go?’ Steapa asked usefully.

‘The nuns said he was going to Tweoxnam,’ the messenger said.

‘But he gave me his oath!’ Edward protested.

‘He was always a lying bastard,’ I said. I looked at the man who had brought the news. ‘He told the nuns he was going to Tweoxnam?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘He said the same to me,’ I said.

Edward gathered himself. ‘I want every man armed and mounted,’ he told Steapa, ‘and ready to ride to Tweoxnam.’

‘Is that his only estate, lord King?’ I asked.

‘He owns Wimburnan,’ Edward said, ‘why?’

‘Isn’t his father buried at Wimburnan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then that’s where he’s gone,’ I said. ‘He told us Tweoxnam because he wants to confuse us. If you abduct someone you don’t tell your pursuers where you’re taking them.’

‘Why abduct Æthelflaed?’ Edward was looking lost again.

‘Because he wants Mercia on his side,’ I said. ‘Is she friendly to him?’

‘Friendly? We all tried to be,’ Edward said. ‘He’s our cousin.’

‘He thinks he can persuade her to bring Mercia to his cause,’ I suggested, and did not add that it would not just be Mercia. If Æthelflaed declared for her cousin then many in Wessex would be persuaded to support him.’

‘We go to Tweoxnam?’ Steapa asked uncertainly.

Edward hesitated, then shook his head and looked to me. ‘The two places are very close,’ he said, still hesitant, but then remembered he was a king and made up his mind. ‘We ride to Wimburnan,’ he said.

‘And I go with you, lord King,’ I said.

‘Why?’ Æthelred blurted the question before he had the sense or time to think what he was asking. The king and the ealdormen looked embarrassed.

I let the question hang till its echo had faded, then smiled. ‘To protect the honour of the king’s sister, of course,’ I said, and I was still laughing when we rode out.

It took time, it always takes time. Horses had to be saddled, mail donned and banners fetched, and while the royal housecarls readied themselves I went with Osferth to Saint Hedda’s where Abbess Hildegyth was in tears. ‘He said she was wanted at the church,’ she explained to me, ‘that the family was praying together for her father’s soul.’

‘You did nothing wrong,’ I told her.

‘But he’s taken her!’

‘He won’t hurt her,’ I reassured her.

‘But…’ her voice faded, and I knew she was remembering the shame of being raped by the Danes so many years before.

‘She’s Alfred’s daughter,’ I said, ‘and he wants her help, not her enmity. Her support gives him legitimacy.’

‘She’s still a hostage,’ Hild said.

‘Yes, but we’ll get her back.’

‘How?’

I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt, showing Hild the silver cross embedded in the pommel, a cross she had given me so long ago. ‘With this,’ I said, meaning the sword, not the cross.

‘You shouldn’t wear a sword in a nunnery,’ she said with mock sternness.

‘There are many things I shouldn’t do in a nunnery,’ I told her, ‘but I did most of them anyway.’

She sighed. ‘What does Æthelwold hope to gain?’

Osferth answered. ‘He hopes to persuade her that he should be the king. And he hopes she will persuade Lord Uhtred to support him.’ He glanced at me and, at that moment, looked astonishingly like his father. ‘I’ve no doubt,’ he went on drily, ‘he’ll offer to make it possible for the Lord Uhtred and the Lady Æthelflaed to marry, and will probably hold out the throne of Mercia as an enticement. He doesn’t just want the Lady Æthelflaed’s support, he wants Lord Uhtred’s too.’

I had not thought of that and it took me by surprise. There had been a time when Æthelwold and I had been friends, but that was long ago when we were both young and a shared resentment of Alfred had brought us together. Æthelwold’s resentment had soured into hatred, while mine had turned into reluctant admiration, and so we were friends no longer. ‘He’s a fool,’ I said, ‘and he always was a fool.’

‘A desperate fool,’ Osferth added, ‘but a fool who knows this is his last chance to gain the throne.’

‘He’ll not have my help,’ I promised Hild.

‘Just bring her back,’ Hild said, and we rode to do just that.

A small army went westwards. At its heart was Steapa and the king’s bodyguard, and every warrior in Wintanceaster who possessed a horse joined in. It was a bright day, the sky clearing of the clouds that had brought so much rain. Our route took us across the wild lands of southern Wessex where the deer and wild ponies ranged across forest and moor and where the hoof-prints of Æthelwold’s band were easy to follow because the ground was so damp. Edward rode a little behind the vanguard, and with him was a standard-bearer flying the white dragon banner. Edward’s priest, Father Coenwulf, his black skirts draped on his horse’s rump, kept pace with the king, as did two ealdormen, Æthelnoth and Æthelhelm. Æthelred came too, he could hardly avoid an expedition to rescue his wife, but he and his followers stayed with the rearguard, well away from where Edward and I rode, and I remember thinking that we were too many, that a half-dozen men were enough to cope with a fool like Æthelwold.

Other men joined us, leaving their halls to follow the king’s standard, and by the time we left the moorland we must have numbered over three hundred horsemen. Steapa had sent scouts ahead, but they sent no news back, which suggested Æthelwold was waiting behind his hall’s palisade. At one point I spurred my horse off the road and up a low hill to look ahead and Edward pointedly joined me, leaving his guard behind. ‘My father,’ he said, ‘told me I can trust you.’

‘Do you doubt his word, lord King?’ I asked.

‘While my mother says you can’t be trusted.’

I laughed at that. Ælswith, Alfred’s wife, had always hated me, and it was a mutual feeling. ‘Your mother has never approved of me,’ I said mildly.

‘And Beocca tells me you want to kill my children,’ he spoke resentfully.

‘That isn’t my decision, lord King,’ I said, and he looked surprised. ‘Your father,’ I explained, ‘should have slit Æthelwold’s throat twenty years ago, but he didn’t. Your worst enemies, lord King, aren’t the Danes. They’re the men closest to you who want your crown. Your illegitimate children will be a problem for your legitimate sons, but it isn’t my problem. It’s yours.’

He shook his head. This was our first moment alone together since his father’s death. I knew he liked me, but he was also nervous of me. He had only ever known me as a warrior and, unlike his sister, he had never been close to me as a child. He said nothing for a while, but watched the small army file westwards beneath us, its banners bright in the sun. The land gleamed from all the rain. ‘They’re not illegitimate,’ he finally spoke softly. ‘I married Ecgwynn. I married her in a church, before God.’

‘Your father disagreed,’ I said.

Edward shuddered, ‘He was angry. So was my mother.’

‘And Ealdorman Æthelhelm, lord King?’ I asked. ‘He can’t be happy that his daughter’s children won’t be the eldest.’

His jaw tightened. ‘He was assured I didn’t marry,’ he said distantly.

So Edward had surrendered to his parents’ anger. He had agreed to the fiction that his children by Lady Ecgwynn were bastards, but it was apparent that he was unhappy with that surrender. ‘Lord,’ I said, ‘you’re king now. You can raise the twins as your legitimate children. You’re king.’

‘I offend Æthelhelm,’ he asked plaintively, ‘and how long do I stay king?’ Æthelhelm was the wealthiest of Wessex’s nobles, the most powerful voice in the Witan, and a man much liked in the kingdom. ‘My father always insisted that the Witan could make or unmake a king,’ Edward said, ‘and my mother insists I listen to their advice.’

‘You’re the eldest son,’ I said, ‘so you’re king.’

‘Not if Æthelhelm and Plegmund refuse to support me,’ Edward said.

‘True,’ I agreed grudgingly.

‘So the twins must be treated as though they’re illegitimate,’ he said, still unhappy, ‘and stay bastards until I have the power to decree otherwise. And till then they must be kept safe, so they’re going to my sister’s care.’

‘To my care,’ I said flatly.

‘Yes,’ he said. He looked at me searchingly. ‘So long as you promise not to kill them.’

I laughed. ‘I don’t kill babies, lord King. I wait till they grow up.’

‘They must grow up,’ he said, then frowned. ‘You don’t condemn me for sin, do you?’

‘Me! I’m your pagan, lord,’ I said, ‘what do I care about sin?’

‘Then care for my children,’ he said.

‘I will, lord King,’ I promised.

‘And tell me what I do about Æthelred,’ he said.

I stared down at my cousin’s troops, who rode together as the rearguard. ‘He wants to be King of Mercia,’ I said, ‘but he knows he needs Wessex’s support if he’s to survive, so he won’t take the throne without your permission, and you won’t give that.’

‘I won’t,’ Edward said. ‘But my mother insists I need his support too.’

That wretched woman, I thought. She had always liked Æthelred and disapproved of her daughter. Yet what she said was partly true. Æthelred could bring at least a thousand men to a battlefield, and if Wessex were ever to strike against the powerful Danish lords to the north, then those men would be invaluable, but as I had told Alfred a hundred times, it was always best to reckon that Æthelred would find a thousand excuses to keep his warriors at home. ‘So what is Æthelred asking of you?’

Edward did not answer directly. Instead he looked up at the sky, then westwards again. ‘He hates you.’

‘And your sister,’ I said flatly.

He nodded. ‘He wants Æthelflaed returned to…’ he began, but then stopped speaking because a horn sounded.

‘He wants Æthelflaed in his hall or else locked away in a convent,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Edward said, ‘that’s what he wants.’ He stared down at the road from where the horn had sounded a second time. ‘But they want me,’ he said, looking to where Father Coenwulf waved towards us. I could see a couple of Steapa’s men galloping towards the vanguard. Edward dug in his spurs and we cantered to the head of the column where we discovered the two scouts had brought in a priest who half fell from his saddle to kneel before the king.

‘Lord, lord King!’ the priest gasped. He was out of breath.

‘Who are you?’ Edward asked.

‘Father Edmund, lord.’

He had come from Wimburnan where he was the priest and he told how Æthelwold had raised his banner in the town and declared himself King of Wessex.

‘He did what?’ Edward asked.

‘He made me read a proclamation, lord, outside Saint Cuthberga’s.’

‘He’s calling himself king?’

‘He says he’s King of Wessex, lord. He’s demanding that men come and swear allegiance to him.’

‘How many men were there when you left?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, lord,’ Father Edmund said.

‘Did you see a woman?’ Edward asked. ‘My sister?’

‘The Lady Æthelflaed? Yes, lord, she was with him.’

‘Does he have twenty men?’ I asked. ‘Or two hundred?’

‘I don’t know, lord. A lot.’

‘He sent messengers to other lords?’ I asked.

‘To his thegns, lord. He sent me. I’m supposed to bring him men.’

‘And you found me instead,’ Edward said warmly.

‘He’s raising an army,’ I said.

‘The fyrd,’ Steapa said scornfully.

Æthelwold was doing what he thought wise, but he had no wisdom. He had inherited wide estates from his father, and Alfred had been foolish enough to leave those estates untouched, and now Æthelwold was demanding that his tenants come with weapons to make an army that he presumably believed would march on Wintanceaster. But the army would be the fyrd, the citizen army, the labourers and carpenters and thatchers and ploughmen, while Edward had his royal bodyguard, who were all trained warriors. The fyrd was good for defending a burh, or for impressing an enemy with numbers, but to fight, to face a sword-Dane or a raving Northman, a warrior was needed. What Æthelwold should have done was stay in Wintanceaster, murder all Alfred’s children, and then raise his standard, but like a fool he had gone to his own home and now we rode there with warriors.

The day was dying as we neared Wimburnan, the sun was low in the west and the shadows long on the rich slopes where Æthelwold’s sheep and cattle had their grazing. We came from the east and no one tried to prevent us reaching the small town that lay cradled between two rivers that joined close to where a stone church loomed above the shadowed thatch of the roofs. King Æthelred, Alfred’s brother and Æthelwold’s father, lay buried in that church, and beyond it, and surrounded by a tall palisade, was Æthelwold’s hall where a great flag flew. It showed a prancing white stag with fierce eyes and two Christian crosses for antlers, and the low sun was catching the linen that was spread by a small wind and the banner’s dark red field seemed to smoulder like boiling blood in the late daylight.

We rode north around the town, crossing the smaller river and then climbing a shallow slope that led to one of those forts that the ancient people had built all across Britain. This fort had been hacked out of a chalk hilltop, and Father Edmund told me it was called Baddan Byrig and that the local people believed the devil danced there on winter nights. It had three walls of heaped chalk, all overgrown with grass, and two intricate entrances where sheep grazed, and it overlooked the road that Æthelwold must take if he wanted to go north to his Danish friends. Edward’s first instinct had been to block the road to Wintanceaster, but that town was protected by its walls and garrison and I persuaded him that the greater danger was that Æthelwold would escape Wessex altogether.

Our army spread along the skyline beneath its royal banners. Wimburnan lay just a couple of miles south and east of us and we must have looked formidable to anyone watching from the town. We were sunlit by the low rays that reflected the glint of our mail and weapons and that made the bare chalk patches of Baddan Byrig’s walls glow white. That low sun made it difficult to see what was happening in the small town, but I glimpsed men and horses by Æthelwold’s hall and could see people gathered in the streets, yet there was no shield wall defending the road that led to that great hall. ‘How many men does he have?’ Edward asked. He had asked that question a dozen times since we had met Father Edmund, and a dozen times he had been told we did not know, that no one knew, and that it might be forty men or it might be four hundred.

‘Not enough men, lord,’ I said now.

‘What…’ he began, then abruptly checked. He had been about to ask what we should do, then had remembered that he was the king, and was supposed to supply the answer himself.

‘Do you want him dead or alive?’ I asked.

He looked at me. He knew he must make decisions, but did not know what decision to make. Father Coenwulf, who had been his tutor, began to offer advice, but Edward cut him short with a wave of his hand. ‘I want him to stand trial,’ he said.

‘Remember what I told you,’ I said. ‘Your father could have saved us a lot of trouble by just killing Æthelwold, so why don’t you let me go and slaughter the bastard?’

‘Or let me, lord,’ Steapa volunteered.

‘He must stand trial before the Witan,’ Edward decided. ‘I do not wish to begin my reign with slaughter.’

‘Amen and God be praised,’ Father Coenwulf said.

I gazed into the valley. If Æthelwold had raised any kind of army, it was not in evidence. All I could see was a handful of horses and an undisciplined rabble. ‘Just let me kill him, lord,’ I said, ‘and the problem will be solved by sundown.’

‘Let me talk to him,’ Father Coenwulf urged.

‘Reason with him,’ Edward said to the priest.

‘Do you reason with a cornered rat?’ I demanded.

Edward ignored that. ‘Tell him he must surrender to our mercy,’ he told Father Coenwulf.

‘And suppose he decides to kill Father Coenwulf instead, lord King?’ I asked.

‘I am in God’s hands,’ Coenwulf said.

‘You’d be better in Lord Uhtred’s hands,’ Steapa growled.

The sun was just above the horizon now, a dazzling red globe suspended in the autumn sky. Edward looked confused, but still wanted to appear decisive. ‘The three of you will go,’ he announced firmly, ‘and Father Coenwulf will do the talking.’

Father Coenwulf lectured me as we rode downhill. I was not to threaten anyone, I was not to speak unless spoken to, I was not to touch my sword, and the Lady Æthelflaed, he insisted, was to be escorted back to her husband’s protection. Father Coenwulf was pale-skinned and stern, one of those rigid men that Alfred had loved to appoint as tutors or counsellors. He was clever, of course, all Alfred’s favoured priests were sharp-witted, but all too ready to condemn sin or, indeed, to define it, which meant he disapproved of me and of Æthelflaed. ‘Do you understand me?’ he demanded as we reached the road, which was little more than a rutted track between untrimmed hedges. Wagtails flocked in the fields and far off, beyond the town, a great cloud of starlings wheeled and faded in the sky.

‘I’m not to threaten anyone,’ I said cheerfully, ‘not to speak to anyone and not to touch my sword. Wouldn’t it be easier if I just stopped breathing?’

‘And we shall restore the Lady Æthelflaed to her proper place,’ Coenwulf said firmly.

‘What is her proper place?’ I asked.

‘Her husband will decide that.’

‘But he wants her in a nunnery,’ I pointed out.

‘If that is her husband’s decision, Lord Uhtred,’ Coenwulf said, ‘then that is her fate.’

‘I think you’ll learn,’ I said mildly, ‘that the lady has a mind of her own. She might not do what any man wants.’

‘She will obey her husband,’ Coenwulf insisted and I just laughed at him, which annoyed him. Poor Steapa looked confused.

There were half a dozen armed men at the outskirts of the town, but they made no attempt to stop us. There was no wall, this was no burh, and we plunged straight into a street that smelt of dung and woodsmoke. The folk in the town were worried, and silent. They watched us, and some made the sign of the cross as we passed. The sun had gone now, it was twilight. We skirted a comfortable-looking tavern, and a man sitting with a horn of ale raised it to us as we rode past. I noted that few men had weapons. If Æthelwold could not raise the fyrd in his own home town, then how could he hope to raise the county against Edward? The gate to Saint Cuthberga’s nunnery opened a crack as we came near and I saw a woman peer out, and then the gate slammed shut. There were more guards at the door to the church, but again they made no effort to stop us. They just watched us pass, their faces sullen. ‘He’s already lost,’ I said.

‘He has,’ Steapa agreed.

‘Lost?’ Father Coenwulf asked.

‘This is his stronghold,’ I said, ‘and no one wants to defy us.’

At least no one wanted to defy us until we reached the entrance to Æthelwold’s hall. The gate was decorated with his flag and guarded by seven spearmen and blocked by a pathetic barricade of barrels on which two logs had been placed. One of the spearmen strode towards us and levelled his weapon. ‘No further,’ he announced.

‘Just take away the barrels,’ I said, ‘and open the gate.’

‘State your names,’ he said. He was a middle-aged man, solidly built, grey-bearded and dutiful.

‘That’s Matthew,’ I said, pointing at Father Coenwulf, ‘I’m Mark, he’s Luke and the other fellow got drunk and stayed behind. You know damn well who we are, so open the gate.’

‘Let us in,’ Father Coenwulf said sternly, after giving me a foul look.

‘No weapons,’ the man said.

I looked at Steapa. He had his long-sword at his left side, his short-sword on the right, and a war axe looped across his back. ‘Steapa,’ I asked him, ‘just how many men have you killed in battle?’

He was puzzled by the question, but thought about his answer. In the end he had to shake his head. ‘I lost count,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ I said, and looked back to the man who faced us. ‘You can take the weapons from us,’ I told him, ‘or you can live and let us through the gate.’

He decided he wanted to live and so ordered his men to remove the barrels and logs, then pull the gates wide, and we rode into the courtyard where torches had just been lit and their wild flames cast fluttering shadows from saddled horses that waited for riders. I counted about thirty men, some in mail and all armed, waiting with the horses, but not one challenged us. Instead they looked nervous. ‘He’s getting ready to flee,’ I said.

‘You are not to talk here,’ Father Coenwulf said testily.

‘Be quiet, you dull priest,’ I told him.

Servants came to take our horses and, as I expected, a steward demanded that Steapa and I give up our swords before we went into the great hall. ‘No,’ I said.

‘My sword stays,’ Steapa said menacingly.

The steward looked flustered, but Father Coenwulf just pushed past the man and we followed him into the great hall that was lit by a blazing fire and by candles arrayed on two tables between which was a throne. There was no other word to do justice to that great chair, which reared high above the massed candles and in which Æthelwold sat, though the moment we appeared he jumped to his feet and strode to the edge of the dais on which the throne had pride of place. There was a second chair on the dais, much smaller and pushed to one side, and Æthelflaed sat there, flanked by two men carrying spears. She saw me, smiled wryly and raised a hand to indicate that she was unharmed. Over fifty men were in the hall. Most were armed, despite the steward’s efforts, but again no one threatened us. Our appearance seemed to have caused a sudden silence. These men, like those in the courtyard, were nervous. I knew a few of them and sensed that the hall was in two minds. The youngest men closest to the dais were Æthelwold’s supporters, while the older men were his thegns, and they were the ones who were plainly unhappy at what was unfolding. Even the dogs in the hall looked whipped. One whined as we entered, then slunk to the hall’s edge, where he then lay shivering. Æthelwold was standing at the dais’s edge with folded arms, trying to look regal, but to me he seemed as nervous as the dogs, though a fair-haired young man beside him was full of energy. ‘Take them prisoner, lord,’ the young man urged Æthelwold.

There is no cause so hopeless, no creed so mad, no idea so ludicrous that it will not attract some believers, and the fair-haired youngster had plainly adopted Æthelwold’s cause as his own. He was a handsome brute, bright-eyed, strong-jawed and strongly built. He wore his hair long and tied behind his neck with a leather ribbon. A second ribbon was around his neck like a thin scarf and it looked oddly feminine because it was pink and made of the precious and delicate silk that is brought to Britain by traders from some far-off land. The tails of the silk ribbon hung over his mail, which was finely wrought, probably made by the expensive smiths in Frankia. His belt was panelled with gold squares and the hilt of his sword was decorated by a crystal pommel. He was rich, he was confident and he faced us belligerently. ‘Who are you?’ Father Coenwulf demanded of the youngster.

‘My name is Sigebriht,’ the young man said proudly, ‘Lord Sigebriht to you, priest.’ So that was the young man who had carried messages between Æthelwold and the Danes, Sigebriht of Cent, who had loved the Lady Ecgwynn and lost her to Edward. ‘Don’t let them talk,’ Sigebriht urged his patron, ‘kill them!’

Æthelwold did not know what to do. ‘Lord Uhtred,’ he greeted me, for want of anything else to say. He should have ordered his men to chop us to pieces, then led his forces out to attack Edward, but he was not man enough, and he probably knew that only a handful of the men in the hall would follow him.

‘Lord Æthelwold,’ Father Coenwulf spoke sternly, ‘we are here to summon you to the court of King Edward.’

‘There is no such king,’ Sigebriht yapped.

‘You will be accorded the dignity of your rank,’ Father Coenwulf ignored Sigebriht and spoke directly to Æthelwold, ‘but you have disturbed the king’s peace and for that you must answer to the king and his Witan.’

‘I am king here,’ Æthelwold said. He drew himself up in an attempt to look regal. ‘I am king,’ he said, ‘and I shall live or die here in my kingdom!’

For a moment I almost felt sorry for him. He had indeed been cheated of the throne of Wessex, thrust aside by his uncle Alfred and forced to watch as Alfred made Wessex into the most powerful kingdom of Britain. Æthelwold had found consolation in ale, mead and wine, and in his cups he could be good company, yet always there had been that ambition to right what he saw was the great wrong done to him in childhood. Now he tried so hard to be kingly, yet even his own followers were not prepared to follow him, all but for a handful of young fools like Sigebriht.

‘You are not king, lord,’ Father Coenwulf said simply.

‘He is king!’ Sigebriht insisted and stepped towards Father Coenwulf as if he would beat the priest down, and Steapa took one pace forward.

I have seen many formidable men in my life, and Steapa was the most frightening. In truth he was a gentle soul, kind and endlessly considerate, but he was a head taller than most men and blessed with a bony face over which the skin seemed to be stretched into a permanently bleak expression that suggested ferocity without pity. At one time men had called him Steapa Snotor, which meant Steapa the Stupid, but it was years since I had heard that jibe. Steapa had been born a slave, but had risen to become the head of the royal bodyguard, and though he was not swift of thought, he was loyal, painstaking and thorough. He was also the most feared warrior of all Wessex and now, as he put one hand on the hilt of his enormous sword, Sigebriht just stopped and I saw the sudden fear on that arrogant young face.

I also saw Æthelflaed smile.

Æthelwold knew he had lost, but he still tried to hold on to his dignity. ‘Father Coenwulf, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Yes, lord.’

‘Your counsel will be wise, I am sure. Perhaps you would give it to me?’

‘That is why I am here,’ Coenwulf said.

‘And say a prayer in my chapel?’ Æthelwold gestured to a door behind him.

‘It would be a privilege,’ Coenwulf said.

‘You too, my dear,’ Æthelwold said to Æthelflaed. He sounded resigned. He beckoned a half-dozen others, his closest companions, who included the abashed Sigebriht, and they all went through the small door at the back of the dais. Æthelflaed looked quizzically at me and I nodded because I had every intention of going to the chapel with her and so she followed Sigebriht, but as soon as we started towards the dais Æthelwold raised a hand. ‘Just Father Coenwulf,’ he said.

‘Where he goes, we go,’ I said.

‘You want to pray?’ Father Coenwulf asked me sarcastically.

‘I want you safe,’ I said, ‘though only your god knows why.’

Coenwulf looked at Æthelwold. ‘I have your word that I am safe in your chapel, lord?’

‘You are my safety, father,’ Æthelwold said with surprising humility, ‘and I want your counsel, I want your prayers, and yes, you have my word that you are safe.’

‘Then wait here,’ Coenwulf snapped at me, ‘both of you.’

‘You trust the bastard?’ I asked, loud enough for Æthelwold to hear.

‘I trust in Almighty God,’ Coenwulf said grandly, and climbed nimbly onto the dais and followed Æthelwold out of the hall.

Steapa put his hand on my arm. ‘Let him go,’ he said, and so he and I waited. Two of the older men came to us and said this had not been their idea and that they had believed Æthelwold when he had assured them that the Witan of Wessex had agreed to his assumption of the throne, and I told them they had nothing to fear so long as they had not raised a weapon against their rightful king. That king, so far as I knew, was still waiting on the old chalk-walled fort to the north of the town, waiting as the long night fell and the stars appeared. And we waited too. ‘How long does a prayer take?’ I asked.

‘I’ve known them to last two hours,’ Steapa said gloomily, ‘and the sermons can take even longer.’

I turned to the steward who had tried to take our swords. ‘Where is the chapel?’ I asked him.

The man looked terrified, then stammered, ‘There is no chapel, lord.’

I swore, hurried to the door at the rear of the hall and pushed it open to see a sleeping chamber. There were fur rugs, woollen blankets, a wooden bucket and a tall unlit candle in a silver holder, beyond which was a second door that led to a smaller courtyard. It was an empty courtyard with an open gate guarded by a lone spearman. ‘Which way did they go?’ I shouted at the guard who answered by pointing west down the street outside.

We ran back to the larger courtyard where our horses were waiting. ‘Go to Edward,’ I suggested to Steapa, ‘tell him the bastard’s running.’

‘And you?’ he asked, hauling himself into the saddle.

‘I’ll go west.’

‘Not on your own,’ he said chidingly.

‘Just go,’ I said.

Steapa was right, of course. There was really little sense in riding alone into the night’s chaos, but I did not want to return to the chalk slopes of Baddan Byrig where, inevitably, the next two hours would be spent discussing what to do. I wondered what had happened to Father Coenwulf, and hoped he was alive, then I was through the gate and scattering the people in the torch-lit street as I spurred the horse down a lane that led eastwards.

Æthelwold had lost his pitiable attempt to be acknowledged King of Wessex, but he had not given up. The folk of his own county had failed to support him, he had only the smallest band of supporters, and so he was fleeing to where he could find swords, shields and spears. He wanted to go north to the Danes, and he had only two choices that I could see. He could ride overland, hoping to circle around the small army that Edward had brought to Wimburnan, or he could go south to where a boat might be waiting for him. I dismissed that last thought. The Danes had not known when Alfred would die, and no Danish boat dared linger in West Saxon waters, which made it more than unlikely that any ship was waiting to rescue Æthelwold. He was on his own for now, and that meant he was trying to ride across country.

And I pursued him, or rather I groped my way into the darkness. There was a moon that night, but the shadows it cast were black on the road and neither I nor the horse could see well and so we went slowly. In places I thought I could detect the fresh hoof-prints, but I could not be sure. The road itself was mud and grass, wide between hedges and tall trees, a drover’s road that followed the river valley as it curved northwards. Sometime in the night I came to a village where light showed in a blacksmith’s hut. A boy was feeding the furnace. That was his job, to keep the fire alight through the darkness, and he cowered when he saw me in my war splendour, my helmet, mail and scabbard lit by the flames that brightened the muddy street.

I stopped the horse and gazed at the boy. ‘When I was your age,’ I spoke from behind my helmet’s cheek-plates, ‘I used to watch a charcoal fire. My job was to stuff the holes with moss and wet earth if any smoke escaped. I watched all night. It can be lonely.’

He nodded, still too terrified to say anything.

‘But I had a girl who used to watch with me,’ I said, remembering Brida in the darkness. ‘You don’t have a girl?’

‘No, lord,’ he said, on his knees now.

‘Girls are the best company on lonely nights,’ I said, ‘even if they do talk too much. Look at me, boy.’ He had lowered his head, perhaps out of awe. ‘Now tell me something,’ I went on, ‘did some men ride through here? They would have had a woman with them.’ The boy said nothing, just stared at me. My horse did not like the heat of the furnace, or perhaps its pungent smell upset him, and so I patted his neck to quieten him. ‘The men told you to keep silent,’ I said to the boy, ‘they said you must keep a secret. Did they threaten you?’

‘He said he was the king, lord,’ the boy almost whispered those words.

‘The real king is close by,’ I said. ‘What’s the name of this place?’

‘Blaneford, lord.’

‘It looks a good place to live. So they rode north?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Not long, lord.’

‘And this road goes to Sceaftesburi?’ I asked, trying to remember these heartlands of rich Wessex. ‘Yes, lord.’

‘How many men were there?’ I asked.

‘Dick and mimp, lord,’ he said, and I realised that was his way of counting, different to the ways I was used to, and he was smart enough to realise it too and held up all his fingers once and then just one hand. Fifteen.

‘Was there a priest?’

‘No, lord.’

‘You’re a good lad,’ I said, and he was, because he had possessed the wit to count. I tossed him a scrap of silver. ‘In the morning,’ I said, ‘tell your father that you met Uhtred of Bebbanburg and that you did your duty to your new king.’

He gazed at me with very wide eyes as I turned and rode into the ford where I let the horse drink very little, then spurred uphill.

I remember thinking I could have died that night. Æthelwold had fourteen companions, not counting Æthelflaed, and he must have known he would be pursued. I assume he thought all of Edward’s army would blunder through the night, but if he had known it was a single horseman he would surely have set an ambush and I would have been beaten down by the blades and so hacked to death in the moonlight. A better death, I thought, than Alfred’s. Better than lying in a stinking room with the pain conquering the body, with a lump in the belly like a stone, with dribble and tears and shit and stench. But then comes the relief of the afterlife, the rebirth into joy. The Christians call it heaven and try to scare us into its marble halls with tales of a hell hotter than the blacksmith’s furnace in Blaneford, but I will go with a burst of light in the arms of a Valkyrie to the great hall of Valhalla, where my friends will wait for me, and not only my friends but my enemies too, the men I have killed in battle, and there will be feasting and drinking and fighting and women. That is our fate, unless we die badly, when we live for ever in the frigid halls of the goddess Hel.

I thought that was strange as I followed Æthelwold through the night. The Christians say that our punishment is hell and the Danes say that those who die badly go to Hel where the goddess of the same name rules. Hell and Hel sound the same, yet they are not the same. Hel is not hell. Hel does not burn people, they just live in misery. Die with a sword in your hand and you will never see Hel’s decaying body or feel hunger in her vast cold caverns, but there is no punishment about Hel’s domain of Hel. It is just ordinary life for ever. The Christians promise punishment or reward as if we are small children, but in truth what comes after is just what went before. All will change, as Ælfadell had told me, and all will be the same as ever it was and ever shall be. And remembering Ælfadell made me think of Erce, of that slim body undulating on mine, of the guttural sounds she had made, of the memory of joy.

Dawn brought the sound of stags roaring. This was the rutting season when starlings blacken the sky and the leaves begin to fall. I paused my tired horse at a rise in the road and looked about me, but saw no one. I seemed to be alone in a misted dawn, suspended in a gold and yellow world that was silent except for the roar of the stags, and even that sound vanished as I looked eastwards and southwards for any sign of Edward’s men, but still saw nothing. I kicked the horse on north towards the smoke-smear in the sky that betrayed the town of Sceaftesburi beyond the hills.

Sceaftesburi was one of Alfred’s burhs, a fortress town that protected both a royal mint and a nunnery that had been beloved of Alfred. Æthelwold would never dare demand entrance to such a town, or risk waiting for its gates to open so that he could ride through the streets. The burh’s commander, whoever he was, would be too curious, which meant Æthelwold must have circled Sceaftesburi. But which way? I searched for tracks and saw nothing obvious. I was tempted to abandon the pursuit, which had been a foolish idea in the first place. I wanted to find a tavern in the burh and eat a meal and find a bed and pay a whore to warm it, but then a hare ran across my path, east to west, and that was surely a sign from the gods. I turned west off the road.

And moments later the mist cleared and I saw the horses on a chalk hill. Between me and the hill was a wide, thickly wooded valley and I spurred into it even as I saw the horsemen had noticed me. They were in a group, staring my way and I saw one point at me, then they turned and went on northwards. I counted only nine men, yet surely it had to be Æthelwold, but once I dropped into the trees I could not look for the remaining horsemen because the mist thickened here and I had to go slowly because the branches dipped low and I needed to duck. Ferns grew thick. A small stream tumbled across my path. A dead tree was layered with fungi and moss. Brambles, ivy and holly choked the undergrowth either side of the path, a path pocked with fresh hoof-prints. It was silent among the trees and in the silence I felt the fear, the prickling, the knowledge born of nothing but experience that danger was close.

I dismounted and tied the horse’s reins to an oak. What I should do, I thought, was remount the horse and ride straight to Sceaftesburi and raise the alarm. I should requisition a fresh horse and lead the garrison’s men in pursuit of Æthelwold, but to do that was to turn my back on whatever threatened me. I drew Serpent-Breath. There was comfort in the feel of her familiar hilt.

I walked on, slowly.

Had the horsemen on the hill seen me before I saw them? That seemed likely. I had been lost in thought as I followed the road, half dreaming, half thinking. Suppose they had seen me? They knew I was alone, they probably knew who I was, and I had only seen nine men, which suggested the others had been left in the wood to ambush me. So go back, I told myself, go back and rouse the burh’s garrison, and just as I had decided that was both my duty and the prudent thing to do, two horsemen burst out of cover fifty paces away and charged up the path towards me. One carried a spear, the other a sword. Both had helmets with face-plates, both were in mail, both had shields, and both were fools.

A man cannot fight on horseback in a deep, old wood. There are too many obstacles. They could not ride abreast because the path was too narrow and the undergrowth too thick on either side, and so the spearman led and he, like his companion, was right-handed, which meant the spear was on the right side of his tired horse and to my left. I let them come, wondering why only two were attacking, but put that mystery to one side as they got close and I could see the man’s eyes in the slit of his helmet, and I simply stepped to my right, into brambles and behind an oak’s trunk and the spearman galloped past helplessly and I stepped back out and swung Serpent-Breath with all my strength so that she slammed the second horse in the mouth, splintering teeth and scattering blood and the beast screamed and swerved and the rider was falling, tangled in the reins and stirrups as the first man tried to turn.

‘No!’ a voice shouted from deeper in the trees. ‘No!’

Was he talking to me? Not that it mattered. The swordsman was on his back now, struggling to rise, while the spearman was struggling to turn his horse on the narrow path. The swordsman’s shield was looped to his left forearm so I simply stood on the willow boards, trapping him, and plunged Serpent-Breath down. Hard down. Once.

And there was blood in the leaf-mould and a choking sound and a body shaking beneath me and a dying man’s sword arm going limp as the spearman kicked his horse back towards me. He lunged with the spear, but it was simple to avoid by swaying to one side and I seized the ash shaft and tugged hard and the man had to let go or else be pulled from the saddle, and his horse was backing away as the rider tried to draw his sword and he was still trying when I slid Serpent-Breath up his right thigh, beneath his mail, opening his skin and muscle with her point and edge and then finding the bone of his hip and thrusting harder and shouting with all my breath to scare him and to give the lunge force. The sword was in his body and I was grinding it, turning it, pushing it, and the voice from deep in the wood shouted again, ‘No!’

But yes. The man had half drawn his sword, but the blood was dripping from his boot and stirrup and I simply caught his right elbow with my left hand and pulled so that he came off his horse. ‘Idiot,’ I snarled at him, and killed him as I had killed his companion, then turned fast towards the place from where the voice had sounded.

Nothing.

Somewhere far off a horn sounded, then was answered by another. The sounds came from the south and told me Edward’s forces were coming. A bell began to toll, presumably from Sceaftesburi’s convent or church. The wounded horse whinnied. The second man died and I pulled Serpent-Breath’s tip from his throat. My boots were dark with new blood. I was tired. I wanted that meal and bed and whore, but instead I walked down the path towards the place where the two fools had come from.

The path turned where thick foliage screened the view, then it opened into a glade around a wide stream. The day’s first sunlight flickered through leaves to make the grass very green. There were daisies in the grass and Sigebriht was there with three men and with Æthelflaed, all of them mounted. It was one of these men who had shouted at his two dead companions, but which man, or why, I could not tell.

I walked out of the shadow. The helmet’s face-plates were closed, my mail and boots were blood-spattered, Serpent-Breath was reddened. ‘Who’s next?’ I asked. Æthelflaed laughed. A kingfisher, all red and blue and bright, darted down the stream behind her and vanished in the shadows. ‘Lord Uhtred,’ she said, and kicked her heels so that her horse came towards me.

‘You’re unhurt?’ I asked.

‘They were all very polite,’ she said, looking back at Sigebriht with a mocking expression.

‘There’s only four of them,’ I said, ‘so which one do you want me to kill first?’

Sigebriht drew his crystal-pommelled sword. I was ready to step back among the trees where the trunks would give me an advantage against a mounted man, but to my surprise he threw the sword so that it landed heavily in the dewy grass a few paces from me. ‘I yield to your mercy,’ Sigebriht said. His three men followed his example and threw their swords onto the ground.

‘Off your horses,’ I said, ‘all of you.’ I watched them dismount. ‘Now kneel.’ They knelt. ‘Give me one reason not to kill you,’ I said as I walked towards them.

‘We have yielded to you, lord,’ Sigebriht said, head lowered.

‘You yielded,’ I said, ‘because your two fools failed to kill me.’

‘They were not my fools, lord,’ Sigebriht said humbly, ‘they were Æthelwold’s men. These three are my men.’

‘Did he order those two idiots to attack me?’ I called back to Æthelflaed.

‘No,’ she said.

‘They wanted glory, lord,’ Sigebriht said, ‘they wanted to be known as the slayers of Uhtred.’

I touched the bloodied tip of Serpent-Breath to his cheek. ‘And what do you want, Sigebriht of Cent?’

‘To make my peace with the king, lord.’

‘Which king?’

‘There is only one king in Wessex, lord. King Edward.’

I let Serpent-Breath’s tip lift the long tail of fair hair tied with leather. The blade, I thought, would cut through his neck so easily. ‘Why do you seek peace with Edward?’

‘I was wrong, lord,’ Sigebriht said humbly.

‘Lady?’ I called, not taking my eyes from him.

‘They saw you following,’ Æthelflaed explained, ‘and this man,’ she pointed at Sigebriht, ‘offered to bring me back to you. He told Æthelwold that I would persuade you to join him.’

‘Did he believe that?’

‘I told him I would try and persuade you,’ she said, ‘and he believed me.’

‘He’s a fool,’ I said.

‘And instead I told Sigebriht to make his peace,’ Æthelflaed went on, ‘and that his best hope of living beyond today’s dusk was to abandon Æthelwold and swear allegiance to Edward.’

I put the sword under Sigebriht’s clean-shaven chin and tilted his face up towards me. He was so handsome, so bright-eyed, and in those eyes I could see no guile, only the eyes of a frightened man. Yet I knew I should kill him. I touched the sword-blade to the silk ribbon around his neck. ‘Tell me why I shouldn’t cut through your miserable neck,’ I ordered him.

‘I’ve yielded, lord,’ he said, ‘I beg mercy.’

‘What’s the ribbon?’ I asked, flicking the pink silk with Serpent-Breath’s tip and leaving a smear of blood.

‘It was a gift from a girl,’ he said.

‘The Lady Ecgwynn?’

He gazed up at me. ‘She was beautiful,’ he said wistfully, ‘she was like an angel, she drove men to madness.’

‘And she preferred Edward,’ I said.

‘And she’s dead, lord,’ Sigebriht said, ‘and I think King Edward regrets that as much as I do.’

‘Fight for someone who lives,’ Æthelflaed said, ‘not for the dead.’

‘I was wrong, lord,’ Sigebriht said, and I was not sure I believed him, and so I pressed the sword against his neck and saw the fear in his blue eyes.

‘It is my brother’s decision,’ Æthelflaed said gently, knowing what was in my mind.

I let him live.

That night, so we heard later, Æthelwold crossed the border into Mercia and kept riding north until he reached the safety of Sigurd’s hall. He had escaped.

Eight

Alfred was buried.

The burial took five hours of praying, chanting, weeping and preaching. The old king had been placed in an elm coffin painted with scenes from the lives of the saints, while the lid depicted a surprised looking Christ ascending into heaven. A splinter of the true cross was placed in the dead king’s hands and his head was pillowed by a gospel book. The elm coffin was sheathed in a lead box, which in turn was enclosed by a third casket, this one of cedar and carved with pictures of saints defying death. One saint was being burned, though the flames could not touch her, a second was being tortured yet was smiling forgiveness on her hapless tormentors, while a third was being pierced by spears and still was preaching. The whole cumbersome coffin was carried down to the crypt of the old church where it was sealed in a stone chamber where Alfred rested until the new church was finished, and then he was carried to the vault where he still lies. I remember Steapa weeping like a child. Beocca was in tears. Even Plegmund, that stern archbishop, was crying as he preached. He talked of Jacob’s ladder, which appeared in a dream described in the Christian scriptures, and Jacob, as he lay on his stony pillow beneath the ladder heard the voice of God. ‘The land on which you lie shall be given to your children and to their children’s children,’ Plegmund’s voice broke as he read the words, ‘and your children shall be like the dust of the earth and they shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and by you and your children shall all the families of the world bless themselves.’

‘Jacob’s dream was Alfred’s dream,’ Plegmund’s voice was hoarse by this point in his long sermon, ‘and Alfred now lies here, in this place, and this land shall be given to his children and to his children’s children till the day of judgement itself! And not just this land! Alfred dreamed that we Saxons should spread the light of the gospel through all Britain, and all other lands, until every voice on earth is lifted in praise of God Almighty.’

I remember smiling to myself. I stood at the back of the old church, watching the smoke from the incense burners swirl around the gilded rafters, and it amused me that Plegmund believed that we Saxons should spread like the dust of the earth to the north, south, east and west. We would be lucky if we kept what land we had, let alone spread, but the congregation was moved by Plegmund’s words. ‘The pagans press upon us,’ Plegmund declared, ‘they persecute us! Yet we shall preach to them and we shall pray for them, and we shall see them bow their knee to Almighty God and then Alfred’s dream will come true and there shall be rejoicing in heaven! God will preserve us!’

I should have listened more carefully to that sermon, but I was thinking of Æthelflaed and Fagranforda. I had asked Edward’s permission to go to Mercia, and his reply was to send Beocca to the Two Cranes. My old friend sat by the hearth and chided me for ignoring my eldest son. ‘I don’t ignore him,’ I said. ‘I’d like him to come to Fagranforda as well.’

‘And what will he do there?’

‘What he should do,’ I said, ‘train as a warrior.’

‘He wants to be a priest,’ Beocca said.

‘Then he’s no son of mine.’

Beocca sighed. ‘He’s a good boy! A very good boy.’

‘Tell him to change his name,’ I said. ‘If he becomes a priest he’s not worthy to be called Uhtred.’

‘You’re so like your father,’ he said, which surprised me because I had been frightened of my father. ‘And Uhtred is so like you!’ Beocca went on. ‘He looks like you, and he has your stubbornness,’ he chuckled, ‘you were a most stubborn child.’

I am often accused of being Uhtredærwe, the wicked enemy of Christianity, yet so many I have loved and admired have been Christians, and Beocca was chief among them. Beocca and his wife, Thyra, Hild, Æthelflaed, dear Father Pyrlig, Osferth, Willibald, even Alfred, the list is endless, and I suppose they were all good people because their religion insists they must behave in a certain way, which mine does not. Thor and Woden demand nothing of me except respect and some sacrifice, but they would never be so foolish as to insist that I love my enemy or turn the other cheek. Yet the best Christians, like Beocca, struggle daily to be good. I have never tried to be good, though nor do I think I am wicked. I am just me, Uhtred of Bebbanburg. ‘Uhtred,’ I said to Beocca, talking of my eldest son, ‘will be Lord of Bebbanburg after me. He can’t hold that fortress by prayer. He needs to learn how to fight.’

Beocca stared into the fire. ‘I always hoped I would see Bebbanburg again,’ he said wistfully, ‘but I doubt that will happen now. The king says you may go to Fagranforda.’

‘Good,’ I said.

‘Alfred was generous to you,’ Beocca said sternly.

‘I don’t deny it.’

‘And I had some influence there,’ Beocca said with a little pride. ‘Thank you.’

‘You know why he agreed?’

‘Because Alfred owed me,’ I said, ‘because without Serpent-Breath he wouldn’t have remained king for twenty-eight years.’

‘Because Wessex needs a strong man in Mercia,’ Beocca said, ignoring my boasting.

‘Æthelred?’ I suggested mischievously.

‘He’s a good man, and you’ve wronged him,’ Beocca said fiercely.

‘Maybe,’ I said, avoiding a quarrel.

‘Æthelred is Lord of Mercia,’ Beocca said, ‘and the man with the best claim to the throne of that land, yet he has not tried to take that crown.’

‘Because he’s frightened of Wessex,’ I said.

‘He has been loyal to Wessex,’ Beocca corrected me, ‘but he cannot appear too subservient or the Mercian lords who crave their own country will turn against him.’

‘Æthelred rules in Mercia,’ I said, ‘because he’s the richest man in the country, and whenever a lord loses cattle, slaves or a hall to the Danes he knows that Æthelred will reimburse him. He pays for his lordship, but what he should be doing is crushing the Danes.’

‘He watches the Welsh frontier,’ Beocca said, as if dealing with the Welsh was an adequate excuse for being somnolent with the Danes, ‘but it is appreciated,’ he hesitated over the word, as if it had been carefully selected, ‘appreciated that he is not a natural warrior. He is a superb ruler,’ he hurried on after those words to stifle any laugh he suspected I would give, ‘and his administration is admirable, but he has no talent for warfare.’

‘And I do,’ I said.

Beocca smiled. ‘Yes, Uhtred, you do, but you have no talent for respect. The king expects you to treat Lord Æthelred with respect.’

‘All the respect he deserves,’ I promised.

‘And his wife will be permitted to return to Mercia,’ Beocca said, ‘upon the understanding that she endows, indeed that she builds, a nunnery.’

‘She’s to be a nun?’ I asked, angry.

‘Endows and builds!’ Beocca said. ‘And she will be free to choose wherever she so wishes to endow and to build the nunnery.’

I had to laugh. ‘I’m to live next door to a nunnery?’

Beocca frowned. ‘We cannot know where she will choose.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘of course not.’

So the Christians had swallowed the sin. I assumed that Edward had learned a new tolerance for sin, which was no bad thing and it meant Æthelflaed was free to live more or less as she wished, though the nunnery would serve as an excuse for Æthelred to claim that his wife had chosen a life of holy contemplation. In truth Edward and his council knew they needed Æthelflaed in Mercia, and they needed me too. We were the shield of Wessex, but it seemed we were not to be the sword of the Saxons because Beocca gave me a stern warning before he left the tavern. ‘The king expressly wishes that the Danes be left in peace,’ he said. ‘They are not to be provoked! That is his command.’

‘And if they attack us?’ I asked, annoyed.

‘Of course you may defend yourself, but the king does not wish to start a war. Not before he is crowned.’

I growled acceptance of the policy. I supposed it made sense that Edward wanted to be left in peace while he established his authority over his new kingdom, but I doubted the Danes would oblige him. I was certain they wanted war, and would want it before Edward’s coronation.

That ceremony would not take place until the new year, giving time for honoured guests to arrange their travel and so, as the autumn mists turned colder and the days shrank, I went at last to Fagranforda.

That was a blessed place of sweet low hills, slow rivers and rich earth. Alfred had indeed been generous. The steward was a morose Mercian named Fulk who did not welcome a new lord, and no wonder, for he had lived well off the estate’s income, helped in that by the priest who kept the accounts. That priest, Father Cynric, tried to persuade me that the harvests had been poor of late, and that the stumps in the woodland were there because the trees had died of disease rather than been felled for the value of their timber. He laid out the documents that matched the receipts I had brought from the treasury in Wintanceaster, and Father Cynric smiled happily at that coincidence. ‘As I told you, lord,’ he said, ‘we held the estate in sacred trust, as it were, for King Alfred.’ He beamed at me. He was a plump man, full-faced, with a quick smile.

‘And no one ever came from Wessex to examine your accounts?’

‘What need was there?’ he asked, sounding surprised and amused at such a thought. ‘The church teaches us to be honest labourers in the Lord’s vineyard.’

I took all the documents and put them on the hall fire. Father Cynric and Fulk watched in speechless surprise as the parchments scorched, curled, cracked and burned. ‘You’ve been cheating,’ I said, ‘and now it stops.’ Father Cynric opened his mouth to protest, but then thought better of it. ‘Or do I have to hang one of you?’ I asked. ‘Maybe both?’

Finan searched both Fulk’s and Father Cynric’s houses and found some of their hoarded silver, which I used to buy timber and to pay back the steward who had lent me money. I have always loved to build, and Fagranforda needed a new hall, new storehouses and a palisade, all projects for the winter. I sent Finan north to patrol the lands between the Saxons and the Danes, and he took new men with him, men who came to me because they heard I was wealthy and gave silver. Finan sent messages every few days, and they all said that the Danes were surprisingly quiet. I had been certain that Alfred’s death would provoke an attack, but none came. Sigurd, it seemed, was sick, and Cnut had no desire to attack southwards without his friend. I thought it an opportunity for us to attack northwards and said so in a message to Edward, but the suggestion went unanswered. We heard rumours that Æthelwold had gone to Eoferwic.

Gisela’s brother had died and been succeeded as king in Northumbria by a Dane who ruled only because Cnut allowed it. Cnut, for whatever reason, had no wish to be king, but his man occupied the throne and Æthelwold was sent to Eoferwic presumably because it was so far from Wessex and so deep inside Danish land, and was thus a safe place. Cnut must have believed that Edward might send a force to destroy Æthelwold, and so hid his prize behind Eoferwic’s formidable Roman walls.

So Æthelwold cowered, Cnut waited and I built. I made a hall as high as a church with stout beams and a tall palisade. I nailed wolf skulls to the gable, which faced the rising sun, and I hired men to make tables and benches. I had a new steward, a man called Herric who had been wounded in the hip at Beamfleot and could no longer fight, but Herric was energetic and mostly honest. He suggested we build a mill on the stream, a good suggestion.

It was while I was searching for a good place to make the mill that the priest arrived. It was a cold day, as cold as the day on which Father Willibald had found me in Buccingahamm, and the edges of the stream were crackling with thin ice. A wind came cold from the northern uplands, while from the south came a priest. He rode a mule, but scrambled out of the saddle when he came close to me. He was young and even taller than I was. He was skeletally thin, his black robe was filthy and its hems caked with dried mud. His face was long, his nose like a beak, his eyes bright and very green, his fair hair straggly and his chin nonexistent. He had the wispiest, most pathetic beard, which dangled halfway down a long, thin neck around which he wore a large silver cross which was missing one of its arms. ‘You are the great Lord Uhtred?’ he enquired earnestly.

‘I am,’ I said.

‘And I am Father Cuthbert,’ he introduced himself, ‘and so very pleased to meet you. Do I bow?’

‘Grovel, if you like.’

To my surprise he went down on his knees. He bowed his head almost to the frost-whitened grass, then unfolded and stood. ‘There,’ he said, ‘I grovelled. Greetings, lord, from your new chaplain.’

‘My what?’

‘Your chaplain, your own priest,’ he said brightly. ‘It’s my punishment.’

‘I don’t need a chaplain.’

‘I’m sure you don’t, lord. I’m unnecessary, I know. I am not needed, I am a mere blight on the eternal church. Cuthbert the Unnecessary.’ He smiled suddenly as an idea struck him. ‘If I’m ever made into a saint,’ he said, ‘I shall be Saint Cuthbert the Unnecessary! It would distinguish me from the other Saint Cuthbert, would it not? It would, indeed it would!’ He capered a few steps of gangling dance. ‘Saint Cuthbert the Unnecessary!’ he chanted. ‘Patron saint of all useless things. Nevertheless, lord,’ he composed his face into a serious expression, ‘I am your chaplain, a burden upon your purse, and I require food, silver, ale and especially cheese. I’m very fond of cheese. You say you don’t need me, lord, but I am here nonetheless, and at your humble service.’ He bowed again. ‘You wish to say confession? You want me to welcome you back into the bosom of Mother Church?’

‘Who says you’re my chaplain?’ I asked.

‘King Edward. I’m his gift to you.’ He smiled beatifically, then made a sign of the cross towards me. ‘Blessings on you, lord.’

‘Why did Edward send you?’ I asked.

‘I suspect, lord, because he has a sense of humour. Or,’ he frowned, thinking, ‘perhaps because he dislikes me. Except I don’t think he does, in fact he doesn’t dislike me at all, he’s very fond of me, though he believes I need to learn discretion.’

‘You’re indiscreet?’

‘Oh, lord, I am so many things! A scholar, a priest, an eater of cheese, and now I am chaplain to Lord Uhtred, the pagan who slaughters priests. That’s what they tell me. I’d be eternally grateful if you refrained from slaughtering me. May I have a servant, please?’

‘A servant?’

‘To wash things? To do things? To look after me? A maid would be a blessing. Something young with nice breasts?’

I was grinning by then. It was impossible not to like Saint Cuthbert the Unnecessary. ‘Nice breasts?’ I asked sternly.

‘If it pleases you, lord. I was warned you were more likely to slaughter me, to make me into a martyr, but I would much prefer breasts.’

‘Are you really a priest?’ I asked him.

‘Oh indeed, lord, I am. You can ask Bishop Swithwulf! He made me a priest! He laid his hands on me and said all the proper prayers.’

‘Swithwulf of Hrofeceastre?’ I asked.

‘The very same. He’s my father and he hates me!’

‘Your father?’

‘My spiritual father, yes, not my real father. My real father was a stonemason, bless his little hammer, but Bishop Swithwulf educated me and raised me, God bless him, and now he detests me.’

‘Why?’ I asked, already suspecting the answer.

‘I’m not allowed to say, lord.’

‘Say it anyway, you’re indiscreet.’

‘I married King Edward to Bishop Swithwulf’s daughter, lord.’

So the twins who were now in Æthelflaed’s care were legitimate, a fact that would upset Ealdorman Æthelhelm. Edward was pretending otherwise in case the Witan of Wessex decided to offer the throne elsewhere, and the evidence of his first marriage had been sent to my care.

‘God, you’re a fool,’ I said.

‘So the bishop tells me. Saint Cuthbert the Foolish? But I was a friend of Edward, and he begged me, and she was a delightful little thing. So pretty,’ he sighed.

‘She had nice breasts?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘They were like two young fawns, lord,’ he said earnestly.

I’m sure I gaped at him. ‘Two young fawns?’

‘The holy scriptures describe perfect breasts as being like two young fawns, lord. I have to say I’ve researched the matter thoroughly,’ he paused to consider what he had just said, then nodded approval, ‘very thoroughly! Yet still the similarity escapes me, and who am I to question the holy scriptures?’

‘And now,’ I said, ‘everyone is saying the marriage never happened.’

‘Which is why I can’t tell you that it did,’ Cuthbert said.

‘But it did,’ I said, and he nodded. ‘So the twin babies are legitimate,’ I went on, and he nodded again. ‘Didn’t you know Alfred would disapprove?’ I asked.

‘Edward wanted the marriage,’ he said simply and seriously.

‘And you’re sworn to silence?’

‘They threatened to send me to Frankia,’ he said, ‘to a monastery, but King Edward preferred I came to you.’

‘In hope that I’d kill you?’

‘In hope, lord, that you would protect me.’

‘Then for God’s sake don’t go around telling people that Edward was married.’

‘I shall keep silence,’ he promised, ‘I shall be Saint Cuthbert the Silent.’

The twins were with Æthelflaed, who was building her convent in Cirrenceastre, a town not far from my new estate. Cirrenceastre had been a great place when the Romans ruled in Britain and Æthelflaed lived in one of their houses, a fine building with large rooms enclosing a pillared courtyard. The house had once belonged to the older Æthelred, Ealdorman of Mercia and husband to my father’s sister, and I had known it as a child when I fled south from my other uncle’s usurpation of Bebbanburg. The older Æthelred had expanded it so that Saxon thatch was joined to Roman tile, but it was a comfortable house and well protected by Cirrenceastre’s walls. Æthelflaed had men pulling down some ruined Roman houses and was using the stone to make her convent. ‘Why bother?’ I asked her.

‘Because it was my father’s wish,’ she said, ‘and because I promised to do it. It will be dedicated to Saint Werburgh.’

‘She’s the woman who frightened the geese?’

‘Yes.’

Æthelflaed’s household was loud with children. There was her own daughter, Ælfwynn, and my two youngest, Stiorra and Osbert. My oldest, Uhtred, was still at school in Wintanceaster from where he wrote me dutiful letters that I did not bother to read because I knew they were filled with tedious pieties. The youngest children at Cirrenceastre were Edward’s twins who were just babies. I remember looking at Æthelstan in his swaddling clothes and thinking that so many problems could be solved with one plunge of Serpent-Breath. I was right in that, but wrong too, and little Æthelstan would grow into a young man I loved. ‘You know he’s legitimate?’ I asked Æthelflaed.

‘Not according to Edward,’ she said tartly.

‘I have the priest who married them in my household,’ I told her.

‘Then tell him to keep his mouth shut,’ she said, ‘or he’ll be buried with it open.’

We were in Cirrenceastre, which lay not that far from Gleawecestre where Æthelred had his hall. He hated Æthelflaed, and I worried he would send men to capture her, then either simply kill her or immure her in a nunnery. She no longer had the protection of her father, and I doubted Edward frightened Æthelred nearly as much as Alfred had, but Æthelflaed dismissed my fears. ‘He might not be worried by Edward,’ she said, ‘but he’s terrified of you.’

‘Will he make himself King of Mercia?’ I asked.

She watched a mason chip at a Roman statue of an eagle. The poor man was attempting to make it look like a goose, and so far had only managed to make it resemble an indignant chicken. ‘He won’t,’ Æthelflaed said.

‘Why not?’

‘Too many powerful men in southern Mercia want Wessex’s protection,’ she said, ‘and Æthelred really is not interested in power.’

‘He’s not?’

‘Not now. He used to be. But he falls ill every few months and he fears death. He wants to fill what time he has with women.’ She gave me a very tart look. ‘He’s like you in some ways.’

‘Nonsense, woman,’ I said, ‘Sigunn is my housekeeper.’

‘Housekeeper,’ Æthelflaed said scornfully.

‘And terrified of you.’

She liked that and laughed, then she sighed as an unwise blow of the mason’s mallet knocked off the sad chicken’s beak. ‘All I asked for,’ she said, ‘was a statue of Werburgh and one goose.’

‘You want too much,’ I teased her.

‘I want what my father wanted,’ she said quietly, ‘England.’

In those days I was always surprised when I heard that name. I knew Mercia and Wessex, and I had been to East Anglia and reckoned Northumbria was my homeland, but England? It was a dream back then, a dream of Alfred’s, and now, after his death, that dream was as vague and faraway as ever. It seemed likely that if ever the four kingdoms were to be joined then they would be called Daneland rather than England, yet Æthelflaed and I shared Alfred’s dream. ‘Are we English?’ I asked her.

‘What else?’

‘I’m Northumbrian.’

‘You’re English,’ she said firmly, ‘and have a Danish bedwarmer.’ She prodded me hard in the ribs. ‘Tell Sigunn I wish her a good Christmas.’

I celebrated Yule with a feast at Fagranforda. We made a great wheel from timber, more than ten paces wide, and we wrapped it in straw and mounted it horizontally on an oak pillar and greased the spindle with fleece-oil so that the wheel could revolve. Then, after dark, we set fire to it. Men used rakes or spears to turn the wheel, which whirled about spewing sparks. My two youngest children were with me, and Stiorra held my hand and gazed wide-eyed at the huge burning wheel. ‘Why did you set fire to it?’ she asked.

‘It’s a sign to the gods,’ I said, ‘it tells them that we remember them, and it begs them to bring new life to the year.’

‘It’s a sign to Jesus?’ she asked, not quite comprehending.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and to the other gods.’

There was a cheer when the wheel collapsed and then men and women competed to jump over the flames. I held my two children in my arms and leaped with them, flying through the smoke and sparks. I watched those sparks fly into the cold night and I wondered how many other wheels were burning in the north where the Danes dreamed of Wessex.

Yet if they dreamed they did nothing about those dreams. That, of itself, was surprising. Alfred’s death, it seemed to me, should have been a signal to attack, but the Danes had no one leader to unite them. Sigurd was still sick, we heard Cnut was busy beating the Scots into submission, and Eohric did not know whether his loyalties were to the Christian south or to the Danish north and so did nothing. Haesten still lurked in Ceaster, but he was weak. Æthelwold remained in Eoferwic, but he was helpless to attack Wessex until Cnut allowed it and so we were left in peace, though I was sure that could not last.

I was tempted, so tempted, to go north and consult Ælfadell again, yet I knew that was stupid, and I knew it was not Ælfadell I wished to see, but Erce, that strange, silent beauty. I did not go, but I had news when Offa came to Fagranforda and I sat him in my new hall and piled the fire high to warm his old bones.

Offa was a Mercian who had once been a priest, but whose faith had weakened. He abandoned the priesthood and instead walked about Britain with a pack of trained terriers who amused folk at fairs by walking on their hind legs and dancing. The few coins those dogs collected would never have paid for Offa’s fine house in Liccelfeld, but his real talent, the skill that had made him wealthy, was his ability to learn about men’s hopes, dreams and intentions. His ludicrous dogs were welcome in every great hall, whether Dane or Saxon, and Offa was sharp-eared and sharp-minded, and he listened, he questioned, and then he sold what he had learned. Alfred had used him, but so did Sigurd and Cnut. It was Offa who told me what happened in the north. ‘Sigurd’s sickness doesn’t seem fatal,’ he told me, ‘just weakening. He has fevers, he recovers, then they come back.’

‘Cnut?’

‘He won’t attack south till he knows Sigurd will join him.’

‘Eohric?’

‘Pisses himself with worry.’

‘Æthelwold?’

‘Drinks and humps servant girls.’

‘Haesten?’

‘Hates you, smiles, dreams of revenge.’

‘Ælfadell?’

‘Ah,’ he said, and smiled. Offa was a lugubrious man who rarely smiled. His long, deep-lined face was guarded and shrewd. He cut a slice of the cheese made in my dairy. ‘I hear you’re building a mill?’

‘I am.’

‘Sensible, lord. A good place for a mill. Why pay a miller when you can grind your own wheat?’

‘Ælfadell?’ I asked again, placing a silver coin on the table.

‘I hear you visited her?’

‘You hear too much,’ I said.

‘You compliment me,’ Offa said, scooping up the coin. ‘So you met her granddaughter?’

‘Erce.’

‘So Ælfadell calls her,’ he said, ‘and I envy you.’

‘I thought you had a new young wife?’

‘I do,’ he said, ‘but old men shouldn’t take young wives.’

I laughed. ‘You’re tired?’

‘I’m getting too old to keep straying the roads of Britain.’

‘Then stay home in Liccelfeld,’ I said, ‘you don’t need the silver.’

‘I have a young wife,’ he said, amused, ‘so I need the peace of constant travel.’

‘Ælfadell?’ I asked yet again.

‘She was a whore in Eoferwic,’ he said, ‘years ago. That’s where Cnut found her. She told fortunes as well as whoring, and she must have told Cnut something that turned out to be true because he took her under his shield.’

‘He gave her the cave at Buchestanes?’

‘It’s his land, so yes.’

‘And she tells folk what he wants them to hear?’

Offa hesitated, always a sign that whatever answer was required needed a little more money. I sighed and placed another coin on the table. ‘She speaks his words,’ Offa confirmed.

‘So what’s she saying now?’ I asked, and he hesitated again. ‘Listen,’ I went on, ‘you wizened piece of goat gristle, I’ve paid enough. So tell me.’

‘She’s saying that a new king of the south will arise in the north.’

‘Æthelwold?’

‘They’ll use him,’ Offa said bleakly. ‘He is, after all, the rightful King of Wessex.’

‘He’s a drunken idiot.’

‘When did that make a man unfit to be king?’

‘So the Danes will use him to placate the Saxons,’ I said, ‘then kill him.’

‘Of course.’

‘Then why wait?’

‘Because Sigurd is sick, because the Scots are threatening Cnut’s land, because the stars aren’t aligned propitiously.’

‘So Ælfadell can only tell men to wait for the stars?’

‘She’s saying that Eohric will be King of the Sea, that Æthelwold will be King of Wessex, and that all the great lands of the south will be given to the Danes.’

‘King of the Sea?’

‘Just a fancy way of saying that Sigurd and Cnut won’t take Eohric’s throne. They worry that he’ll ally himself with Wessex.’

‘And Erce?’

‘Is she as beautiful as men say?’ he asked.

‘You haven’t seen her?’

‘Not in her cave.’

‘Where she’s naked,’ I said and Offa sighed. ‘She is more than beautiful,’ I said.

‘So I hear. But she’s a mute. She can’t speak. Her mind is touched. I don’t know if she’s mad, but she is like a child. A beautiful, dumb, half-mad child who drives men wholly mad.’

I thought about that. I could hear the sound of blades on blades outside the hall, the sound of steel hammering linden-wood shields. My men were practising. All day, every day, men rehearse warfare, using sword and shield, axe and shield, spear and shield, readying themselves for the day when they must face Danes who practise just as much. That day, it seemed, was being delayed by Sigurd’s bad health. We should attack instead, I thought, but to invade northern Mercia I needed troops from Wessex, and Edward had been advised by the Witan to keep Britain’s fragile peace.

‘Ælfadell is dangerous,’ Offa interrupted my thoughts.

‘An old woman babbling her master’s words?’

‘And men believe her,’ he said, ‘and men who believe they know fate do not fear risk.’

I thought of Sigurd’s foolhardy attack on the bridge at Eanulfsbirig and knew Offa was right. The Danes might be waiting to attack, but all the time they were hearing magical prophecies that told them they would win. And rumours of those prophecies were spreading through the Saxon lands. Wyrd bi ful ræd. I had an idea, and opened my mouth to speak, then thought better of it. If a man wants to keep a secret then Offa was the last man to tell because he made his living betraying other men’s secrets. ‘You were about to speak, lord?’ he asked.

‘What do you hear about the Lady Ecgwynn?’ I asked.

He looked surprised. ‘I thought you knew more about her than I do.’

‘I know she died,’ I said.

‘She was frivolous,’ Offa said disapprovingly, ‘but very lovely. Elfin.’

‘And married?’

He shrugged. ‘I hear a priest performed a ceremony, but there was no contract between Edward and her father. Bishop Swithwulf’s no fool! He refused to allow it. So was the marriage legal?’

‘If a priest performed it.’

‘Marriage requires a contract,’ Offa said sternly. ‘They weren’t two peasants humping like pigs in a mud-floored hut, but a king and a bishop’s daughter. Of course there must be a contract, and a bride-price! Without those? It’s just a royal rut.’

‘So the children are illegitimate?’

‘That’s what the Witan of Wessex says, so it must be true.’

I smiled. ‘They’re sickly children,’ I lied, ‘and most unlikely to live.’

Offa could not hide his interest. ‘Truly?’

‘Æthelflaed can’t persuade the boy to suckle his wet nurse,’ I lied again, ‘and the girl is frail. Not that it matters if they die, they’re illegitimate.’

‘Their deaths would solve many problems,’ Offa said.

So I had done Edward one small service by spreading a rumour that would please Æthelhelm, his father-in-law. In truth the twins were healthy, squalling babies, and problems in the making, but problems that could wait, just as Cnut had decided that his invasion of southern Mercia and Wessex must wait.

There are seasons of our lives when nothing seems to be happening, when no smoke betrays a burned town or homestead and few tears are shed for the newly dead. I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war.

Spring came and with it Edward’s coronation at Cyninges Tun, the King’s town, which lay just west of Lundene. I thought it a strange choice. Wintanceaster was the main town of Wessex where Alfred had built his great new church and where the largest royal palace stood, but Edward had chosen Cyninges Tun. It was true that it was a great royal estate, but of late it had been ignored because it was too close to Lundene and, before I captured that city from the Danes, Cyninges Tun had been plundered again and again. ‘The archbishop says it’s where some of the old monarchs were crowned,’ Edward explained to me, ‘and there’s a stone here.’

‘A stone, lord?’

He nodded. ‘It’s a royal stone. The old kings either stood on it or sat on it, I’m not sure which.’ He shrugged, evidently confused by the stone’s purpose. ‘Plegmund thinks it’s important.’

I had been summoned to the royal estate a week before the ceremonies and ordered to bring as many household warriors as I could muster. I had seventy-four men, all mounted, all well-equipped, and Edward added a hundred of his own men and asked that we protect Cyninges Tun during his crowning. He feared that the Danes would attack and I gladly agreed to keep guard. I would much rather have been on horseback under the open skies than sitting and standing through hours of Christian ceremony, and so I rode the empty countryside while Edward sat or stood on the royal stone and had his head anointed with holy oil and then crowned with his father’s emerald-studded crown.

No Danes attacked. I had been so sure that Alfred’s death would mean war, but it brought one of those strange periods during which swords rested in their scabbards, and Edward was crowned in peace and afterwards he went to Lundene and summoned me there to a great council. The streets of the old Roman city were hung with banners, all in celebration of Edward’s coronation, while the formidable ramparts were thick with troops. None of that was surprising, but what was astonishing was to find Eohric there.

King Eohric of East Anglia, who had conspired to kill me, was in Lundene by invitation of Archbishop Plegmund who had sent two of his own nephews as hostages to guarantee the king’s safety. Eohric and his followers had come up the Temes in three lion-prowed boats and were now quartered in the great Mercian palace that crowned the hill at the centre of the old Roman city. Eohric was a big man, bellied like a pregnant sow, strong as a bullock, with a suspicious, small-eyed face. I first saw him on the ramparts where he was walking with a group of his men along the old Roman defences. He had three wolfhounds on leashes and their presence on the ramparts was provoking the dogs in the city beneath to howl. Weohstan, the commander of the garrison, was Eohric’s guide, presumably because Edward had ordered him to show the East Anglian king whatever he wanted to see.

I was with Finan. We climbed to the ramparts up a Roman stair built into one tower of the gate that men called the Bishop’s Gate. It was morning, and the sun was warming the old stone. It stank because the ditch outside the wall was filling with refuse and offal. Children were scavenging there.

A dozen West Saxon soldiers were clearing the way for Eohric’s men, but they let me alone and Finan and I just waited as the East Anglians approached us. Weohstan looked alarmed, perhaps because Finan and I were both wearing swords, though neither of us had mail or helmets or shields. I bowed to the king. ‘You’ve met the Lord Uhtred?’ Weohstan asked Eohric.

The small eyes stared at me. One of the wolfhounds snarled and was quietened. ‘The burner of boats,’ Eohric said, clearly amused.

‘He burns towns too,’ Finan could not resist saying, reminding Eohric that I had burned his fine port at Dumnoc.

Eohric’s mouth tightened, but he did not rise to the bait. Instead he glanced south at the city. ‘A fine place, Lord Uhtred.’

‘May I ask what brings you here, lord King?’ I asked respectfully.

‘I am a Christian,’ Eohric said. His voice was a rumble, impressive and deep, ‘and the Holy Father in Rome tells me that Plegmund is my spiritual father. The archbishop invited me, I came.’

‘We’re honoured,’ I said, because what else do you say to a king?

‘Weohstan tells me you captured the city,’ Eohric said. He sounded bored, like a man who knows he must make conversation, but is not interested in what is being said.

‘I did, lord.’

‘At the gate over there?’ he gestured west towards Ludd’s Gate.

‘Yes, lord King.’

‘You must tell me the tale,’ he said, though he was only being polite. We were both being polite. This was a man who had tried to kill me and neither of us acknowledged that, but instead made stilted conversation. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that the wall beside the Bishop’s Gate was the most vulnerable place in the whole three miles of Roman ramparts. It offered the easiest approach, though the rubbish-stinking ditch was a formidable obstacle, but east of the gate the wall’s ragstone had crumbled in places and been replaced with a palisade of oak trunks. A whole stretch of wall between the Bishop’s Gate and the Old Gate was derelict. When I had commanded the garrison I had made the palisade, but it needed repair and if Lundene could be captured then this was the easiest place to attack, and Eohric was thinking the same thing. He gestured to a man beside him. ‘This is the Jarl Oscytel,’ he said.

Oscytel was the commander of Eohric’s household troops. He was what I expected, big and brutal, and I nodded to him and he nodded back. ‘You’ve come to pray too?’ I asked him.

‘I come because my king ordered me to come,’ Oscytel said.

And why, I thought angrily, had Edward allowed this nonsense? Eohric and Oscytel could well become Wessex’s enemies, yet here they were being welcomed to Lundene and treated as honoured guests. There was a great feast that night and one of Edward’s harpists chanted a great poem in praise of Eohric, celebrating his heroism, though in truth Eohric had never made any great reputation in battle. He was a sly, clever man, who ruled by force, who avoided battle, who survived because his kingdom lay at the edge of Britain and so no armies needed to cross his land to reach their enemies.

Yet Eohric was not negligible. He could lead at least two thousand well-equipped warriors to war and if the Danes were ever to make a wholehearted assault on Wessex then Eohric’s men would be a valuable addition. Equally, if the Christians were ever to make an assault on the northern pagans they would welcome those two thousand troops. Both sides tried to seduce Eohric and Eohric received the gifts, made promises and did nothing.

Eohric did nothing, but he was the key to Plegmund’s grand idea to unite all Britain. The archbishop claimed it had come to him in a dream after Alfred’s funeral, and he had persuaded Edward that the dream was from God. Britain would be united by Christ, not by the sword, and there was something propitious in the year, 900. Plegmund believed, and convinced Edward, that Christ would return in the year 1000, and that it was the divine will that the last hundred years of the Christian millennium should be spent converting the Danes in readiness for the second coming. ‘War has failed,’ Plegmund thundered from his pulpit, ‘so we must put our faith in peace!’ He believed the time had come to convert the pagans and he wanted Eohric’s Christian Danes to be his missionaries to Sigurd and Cnut.

‘He wants what?’ I asked Edward. I had been summoned to the king’s presence on the morning after the great feast and had listened as Edward explained the archbishop’s hopes.

‘He wants the conversion of the heathen,’ Edward said stiffly.

‘And they want Wessex, lord.’

‘Christian will not fight Christian,’ Edward said.

‘Tell that to the Welsh, lord King.’

‘They keep the peace,’ he said, ‘mostly.’

He was married by then. His bride, Ælflæd, was little more than a child, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, already pregnant, and she was playing with her companions and a kitten in the small garden where I had so often met Æthelflaed. The window in the king’s chamber looked down on that small garden and Edward saw where I was looking. He sighed. ‘The Witan believes Eohric will prove an ally.’

‘Your father-in-law believes that?’

Edward nodded. ‘We’ve had war for three generations,’ he said sternly, ‘and still it has not brought peace. Plegmund says we must try prayer and preaching. My mother agrees.’

I laughed at that. So we were to defeat our enemies with prayer? Cnut and Sigurd, I thought, would welcome that tactic. ‘And what does Eohric want from us?’ I asked.

‘Nothing!’ Edward seemed surprised by the question.

‘He wants nothing, lord?’

‘He wants the archbishop’s blessing.’

Edward, in those first years of his reign, was under the influence of his mother, his father-in-law, and the archbishop, and all three resented the cost of war. Building the burhs and equipping the fyrd had taken huge sums of silver, while to put an army into the field cost even more, and that money came from the church and from the ealdormen. They wanted to keep their silver. War is expensive, but prayer is free. I scoffed at the idea, and Edward cut me off with an abrupt gesture. ‘Tell me about the twins,’ he said.

‘They thrive,’ I said.

‘My sister said the same, but I heard Æthelstan won’t suckle?’ he sounded anguished.

‘Æthelstan sucks like a bull calf,’ I said. ‘I started a rumour that he’s weak. It’s what your mother and your father-in-law want to hear.’

‘Ah,’ Edward said, and smiled. ‘I’m forced to deny their legitimacy,’ he went on, ‘but they are dear to me.’

‘They’re safe and well, lord,’ I assured him.

He touched my forearm. ‘Keep them that way! And Lord Uhtred,’ his hand tightened on my forearm to emphasise his next words, ‘I don’t want the Danes provoked! You understand me?’

‘Yes, lord King.’

He suddenly realised he was gripping my arm and pulled his hand away. He was awkward with me, I assumed because he was embarrassed that he had made me nursemaid to his royal bastards, or perhaps because I was his sister’s lover, or perhaps because he had ordered me to keep the peace when he knew I believed that peace was fraudulent. But the Danes were not to be provoked, and I was sworn to obey Edward.

So I set out to provoke the Danes.