The Pale Horseman

'It's a pity, father,' I said to Beocca afterwards, 'that you weren't this belligerent two months ago.'

'I rejoice,' he said loftily, 'to find you in the king's good graces.'

'He's discovered the value,' I said, 'of murderous bastards like me, so perhaps he'll learn to distrust the advice of snivelling bastards like you who told him the Danes could be defeated by prayer.'

He sniffed at that insult, then looked disapprovingly at Iseult. ‘You have news of your wife?'

'None.'

Beocca had some news, though none of Mildrith. He had fled south in front of the invading Danes, getting as far as Dornwaraceaster in Thornsaeta where he had found refuge with some monks. The Danes had come, but the monks had received warning of their approach and had hidden in an ancient fort that lay near the town. The Danes had sacked Dornwaraceaster, taking silver, coins and women, then they had moved eastwards and shortly after that Huppa, the Ealdorman of Thornsaeta, had come to the town with fifty warriors. Huppa had set the monks and townspeople to mending the old Roman walls.

'The folk there are safe for the moment,' Beocca told me, 'but there is not sufficient food if the Danes return and lay siege.'

Then Beocca had heard that Alfred was in the great swamps and Beocca had travelled alone, though on his last day of walking he had met six soldiers going to Alfred and so he had finished his journey with them. He brought no news of Wulfhere, but he had been told that Odda the Younger was somewhere on the upper reaches of the Uisc in an ancient fort built by the old people. Beocca had seen no Danes on his journey.

'They raid everywhere,' he said gloomily, 'but God be praised we saw none of them.'

'Is Dornwaraceaster a large place?' I asked.

'Large enough. It had three fine churches, three!'

'A market?'

'Indeed, it was prosperous before the Danes came.'

'Yet the Danes didn't stay there?'

'Nor were they at Gifle,' he said, ‘and that's a goodly place.'

Guthrum had surprised Alfred, defeated the forces at Cippanhamm and driven the king into hiding, but to hold Wessex he needed to take all her walled towns, and if Beocca could walk three days across country and see no Danes then it suggested Guthrum did not have the men to hold all he had taken.

He could bring more men from Mercia or East Anglia, but then those places might rise against their weakened Danish overlords, so Guthrum had to be hoping that more ships would come from Denmark.

In the meantime, we learned, he had garrisons in Bafium, Readingum, Maerlebeorg and Andefera, and doubtless he held other places, and Alfred suspected, rightly as it turned out, that most of eastern Wessex was in Danish hands, but great stretches of the country were still free of the enemy. Guthrum's men were making raids into those stretches, but they did not have sufficient force to garrison towns like Wintanceaster, Gifle or Dornwaraceaster.

In the early summer, Alfred knew, more ships would bring more Danes, so he had to strike before then, to which end, on the day after Beocca arrived, he summoned a council.

There were now enough men on Æthelingaeg for a royal formality to prevail. I no longer found Alfred sitting outside a hut in the evening, but instead had to seek an audience with him. On the Monday of the council he gave orders that a large house was to be made into a church, and the family that lived there was evicted and some of the newly-arrived soldiers were ordered to make a great cross for the gable and to carve new windows in the walls. The council itself met in what had been Haswold's hall, and Alfred had waited till we were assembled before making his entrance, and we had all stood as he came in and waited as he took one of the two chairs on the newly-made dais. Ælswith sat beside him, her pregnant belly swathed in the silver fur cloak that was still stained with Haswold's blood.

We were not allowed to sit until the Bishop of Exanceaster said a prayer, and that took time, but at last the king waved us down. There were six priests in the half circle and six warriors. I sat beside Leofric, while the other four soldiers were newly-arrived men who had served in Alfred's household troops. One of those was a grey-bearded man called Egwine who told me he had led a hundred men at Uisc's Hill and plainly thought he should now lead all the troops gathered in the swamp. I knew he had urged his case with the king and with Beocca who sat just below the dais at a rickety table on which he was trying to record what was said at the council. Beocca was having difficulties for his ink was ancient and faded, his quill kept splitting and his parchments were wide margins torn from a missal, so he was unhappy, but Alfred liked to reduce arguments to writing.

The king formally thanked the bishop for his prayer, then announced, sensibly enough, that we could not hope to deal with Guthrum until Svein was defeated. Svein was the immediate threat for, though most of his men had gone south to raid Defnascir, he still had the ships with which to enter the swamp. 'Twenty-four ships,' Alfred said, raising an eyebrow at me.

'Twenty-four, lord,' I confirmed.

'So, when his men are assembled, he can muster near a thousand men.' Alfred let that figure linger awhile. Beocca frowned as his split quill spattered ink on his tiny patch of parchment.

'But a few days ago,' Alfred went on, 'there were only seventy ship-guards at the mouth of the Pedredan.'

'Around seventy,' I said. 'There could be more we didn't see.'

'Fewer than a hundred, though?'

'I suspect so, lord.'

'So we must deal with them,' Alfred said, 'before the rest return to their ships.'

There was another silence. All of us knew how weak we were. A few men arrived every day, like the half-dozen who had come with Beocca, but they came slowly, either because the news of Alfred's existence was spreading slowly, or else because the weather was cold and men do not like to travel on wet, cold days.

Nor were there any thegns among the newcomers, not one. Thegns were noblemen, men of property, men who could bring scores of well armed followers to a fight, and every shire had its thegns who ranked just below the reeve and ealdorman, who were themselves thegns. Thegns were the power of Wessex, but none had come to Æthelingaeg.

Some, we heard, had fled abroad, while others tried to protect their property. Alfred, I was certain, would have felt more comfortable if he had a dozen thegns about him, but instead he had me and Leofric and Egwine.

'What are our forces now?' Alfred asked us.

'We have over a hundred men,' Egwine said brightly.

'Of whom only sixty or seventy are fit to fight,' I said. There had been an outbreak of sickness, men vomiting and shivering and hardly able to control their bowels. Whenever troops gather such sickness seems to strike.

'Is that enough?' Alfred asked.

'Enough for what, lord?' Egwine was not quick-witted.

'Enough to get rid of Svein, of course,' Alfred said, and again there was silence because the question was absurd.

Then Egwine straightened his shoulders. 'More than enough, lord.'

Ælswith bestowed a smile on him.

'And how would you propose doing it?' Alfred asked.

'Take every man we have, lord,' Egwine said, 'every fit man, and attack them. Attack them!'

Beocca was not writing. He knew when he was hearing nonsense and he was not going to waste scarce ink on bad ideas.

Alfred looked at me. 'Can it be done?'

'They'll see us coming,' I said, 'they'll be ready.'

'March inland,' Egwine said, 'come from the hills.'

Again Alfred looked at me.

'That will leave Æthelingaeg undefended,' I said, 'and it will take at least three days, at the end of which our men will be cold, hungry and tired, and the Danes will see us coming when we emerge from the hills, and that'll give them time to put on armour and gather weapons. And at best it will be equal numbers. At worst?' I just shrugged. After three or four days the rest of Svein's forces might have returned and our seventy or eighty men would be facing a horde.

'So how do you do it?' Alfred asked.

'We destroy their boats,' I said.

'Go on.'

'Without boats,' I said, 'they can't come up the rivers. Without boats, they're stranded.'

Alfred nodded. Beocca was scratching away again.

'So how do you destroy the boats?' the king asked.

I did not know. We could take seventy men to fight their seventy, but at the end of the fight, even if we won, we would be lucky to have twenty men still standing. Those twenty could burn the boats, of course, but I doubted we would survive that long. There were scores of Danish women at Cynuit and, if it came to a fight, they would join in and the odds were that we would be defeated.

'Fire,' Egwine said enthusiastically. 'Carry fire in punts and throw the fire from the river.'

'There are ship-guards,' I said tiredly, 'and they'll be throwing spears and axes, sending arrows, and you might burn one boat, but that's all.'

'Go at night,' Egwine said.

'It's almost a full moon,' I said, 'and they'll see us coming. And if the moon is clouded we won't see their fleet.'

'So how do you do it?' Alfred demanded again.

'God will send fire from heaven,' Bishop Alewold said, and no one responded.

Alfred stood. We all got to our feet. Then he pointed at me.

'You will destroy Svein's fleet,' he said, 'and I would know how you plan to do it by this evening. If you cannot do it then you,' he pointed to Egwine, 'will travel to Defnascir, find Ealdorman Odda and tell him to bring his forces to the river mouth and do the job for us.'

'Yes, lord,' Egwine said.

'By tonight,' Alfred said to me coldly, and then he walked out.

He left me angry. He had meant to leave me angry. I stalked up to the newly-made fort with Leofric and stared across the marshes to where the clouds heaped above the Saefern.

'How are we to burn twenty-four ships?' I demanded.

'God will send fire from heaven,' Leofric said, 'of course.'

'I'd rather he sent a thousand troops.'

'Alfred won't summon Odda,' Leofric said. 'He just said that to annoy you.'

'But he's right, isn't he?' I said grudgingly. 'We have to get rid of Svein.'

'How?'

I stared at the tangled barricade that Haswold had made from felled trees. The water, instead, of flowing downstream, was coming upstream because the tide was on the flood and so the ripples ran eastwards from the tangled branches.

'I remember a story,' I said, 'from when I was a small child.' I paused, trying to recall the tale which, I assume, had been told to me by Beocca. 'The Christian god divided a sea, isn't that right?'

'Moses did,' Leofric said.

'And when the enemy followed,' I said, 'they were drowned.'

‘Clever,' Leofric said.

‘So that's how we'll do it,' I said.

‘How?'

But instead of telling him I summoned the marsh men and talked with them, and by that night I had my plan and, because it was taken from the scriptures, Alfred approved it readily. It took another day to get everything ready. We had to gather sufficient punts to carry forty men and I also needed Eofer, the simpleminded archer. He was unhappy, not understanding what I wanted, and he gibbered at us and looked terrified, but then a small girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old, took his hand and explained that he had to go hunting with us.

'He trusts you?' I asked the child.

'He's my uncle,' she said. Eofer was holding her hand and he was calm again.

‘Does Eofer do what you tell him?'

She nodded, her small face serious, and I told her she must come with us to keep her uncle happy.

We left before the dawn. We were twenty marsh men, skilled with boats, twenty warriors, a simpleminded archer, a child and Iseult. Alfred, of course, did not want me to take Iseult, but I ignored him and he did not argue. Instead he watched us leave, then went to Æthelingaeg's church that now boasted a newly-made cross of alder-wood nailed to its gable.

And low in the sky above the cross was the full moon. She was low and ghostly pale, and as the sun rose she faded even more, but as the ten punts drifted down the river I stared at her and said a silent prayer to Hoder because the moon is his woman and it was she who must give us victory. Because, for the first time since Guthrum had struck in a winter's dawn, the Saxons were fighting back.

Eig

i ht

Before the Pedredan reaches the sea it makes a great curve through the swamp, a curve that is almost three-quarters of a circle and on the inside of the bank where the curve begins there was another tiny settlement; just a half-dozen hovels built on stilts sunk into a slight rise in the ground.

The settlement was called Palfleot, which means the place with the stakes, for the folk who had once lived-there had staked eel and fish traps in the nearby streams, but the Danes had driven those folk away and burned their houses, so that Palfleot was now a place of charred pilings and blackened mud.

We landed there, shivering in the dawn. The tide was falling, exposing the great banks of sand and mud across which Iseult and I had struggled, while the wind was coming from the west, cold and fresh, hinting of rain, though for now there was a slanting sunlight throwing long shadows of marram grass and reeds across the marshes. Two swans flew south and I knew they were a message from the gods, but what their message was I could not tell.

The punts pushed away, abandoning us. They were now going north and east, following intricate waterways known only to the marsh men. We stayed for a while in Palfleot, doing nothing in particular, but doing it energetically so that the Danes, a long way off across the great bend in the river, would be sure to see us. We pulled down the blackened timbers and Iseult, who had acute eyesight, watched the place where the Danish ships' masts showed as scratches against the western clouds.

'There's a man up a mast,' she said after a while, and I stared, saw the man clinging to the mast top and knew we had been spotted.

The tide was falling, exposing more mud and sand, and now that I was sure we had been seen we walked across the drying expanse that was cradled by the river's extravagant bend.

As we drew closer I could see more Danes in their ships' rigging. They were watching us, but would not yet be worried for they outnumbered my few forces and the river lay between us and them, but whoever commanded in the Danish camp would also be ordering his men to arm themselves. He would want to be ready for whatever happened, but I also hoped he would be clever.

I was laying a trap for him, and for the trap to work he had to do what I wanted him to do, but at first, if he was clever, he would do nothing. He knew we were impotent, separated from him by the Pedredan, and so he was content to watch as we closed on the river's bank opposite his grounded ships and then slipped and slid down the steep muddy bluff that the ebbing tide had exposed.

The river swirled in front of us, grey and cold.

There were close to a hundred Danes watching now. They were on their grounded boats, shouting insults. Some were laughing, for it seemed clear to them that we had walked a long way to achieve nothing, but that was because they did not know Eofer's skills.

I called the big bowman's niece to my side. 'What I want your Uncle Eofer to do,' I explained to the small girl, 'is kill some of those men.'

'Kill them?' She stared up at me with wide eyes.

'They're bad men,' I said, 'and they want to kill you.'

She nodded solemnly, then took the big man by the hand and led him to the water's edge where he sank up to his calves in the mud. It was a long way across the river and I wondered, pessimistically, if it was too far for even his massive bow, but Eofer strung the great stave and then waded into the Pedredan until he found a shallow spot which meant he could go even farther into the river and there he took an arrow from his sheaf, put it on the string and hauled it back. He made a grunting noise as he released and I watched the arrow twitch off the cord, then the fledging caught the air and the arrow soared across the stream and plunged into a group of Danes standing on the steering platform of a ship. There was a cry of anger as the arrow cut down. It did not hit any of the group, but Eofer's next arrow struck a man in his shoulder, and the Danes hurried back from their vantage point by the ship's sternpost. Eofer, who was compulsively nodding his shaggy head and making small animal noises, turned his aim to another ship. He had extraordinary strength. The distance was too great for any accuracy, but the danger of the long white-fledged arrows drove the Danes back and it was our turn to jeer at them. One of the Danes fetched a bow and tried to shoot back, but his arrow sliced into the river twenty yards short and we taunted them, laughed at them, and capered up and down as Eofer's arrows slammed into ships' timbers. Only the one man had been wounded, but we had driven them backwards and that was humiliating to them. I let Eofer loose twenty arrows, then I waded into the river and took hold of his bow. I stood in front of him so the Danes could not see what I was doing.

'Tell him not to worry,' I told the girl, and she soothed Eofer, who was frowning at me and trying to remove his bow from my grasp.

I drew a knife and that alarmed him even more. He growled at me, then plucked the bow from my hand.

'Tell him it's all right,' I told the girl, and she soothed her uncle who then let me half sever the woven hemp bowstring. I stepped away from him and pointed at a group of Danes. 'Kill them,' I said.

Eofer did not want to draw the bow. Instead he fumbled under his greasy woollen cap and produced a second bowstring, but I shook my head and the small girl persuaded him he must use the half-severed cord and so he pulled it nervously back and, just before it reached the full draw, the string snapped and the arrow span crazily into the sky to float away on the river.

The tide had turned and the water was rising. 'We go!' I shouted to my men.

It was now the Danes' turn to jeer at us. They thought we were retreating because our one bowstring had broken, and so they shouted insults as we clambered back up the muddy bluff, and then I saw two men running along the far beach and I hoped they were carrying the orders I wanted.

They were. The Danes, released from the threat of Eofer's terrible how, were going to launch two of their smaller ships. We had stung them, laughed at them and now they would kill us.

All warriors have pride. Pride and rage and ambition are the goads to a reputation, and the Danes did not want us to think we had stung them without being punished for our temerity. They wanted to teach us a lesson. But they also wanted more. Before we left Æthelingaeg I had insisted that my men be given every available coat of mail. Egwine, who had stayed behind with the king, had been reluctant to give up his precious armour, but Alfred had ordered it and so sixteen of my men were dressed in chain mail. They looked superb, like an elite group of warriors, and the Danes would win renown if they defeated such a group and captured the precious armour. Leather offers some protection, but chain mail over leather is far better and far more expensive, and by taking sixteen coats of mail to the river's edge I had given the Danes an irresistible lure. And they snapped at it.

We were going slowly, deliberately seeming to struggle in the soft ground as we headed back towards Palfleot. The Danes were also struggling, shoving their two ships down the riverbank's thick mud, but at last the boats were launched and then, on the hurrying flood tide, the Danes did what I had hoped they would do.

They did not cross the river. If they had crossed, then they would merely have found themselves on the Pedredan's eastern bank and we would have been half a mile ahead and out of reach, so instead the commander did what he thought was the clever thing to do. He tried to cut us off. They had seen us land at Palfleot and they reckoned our boats must still be there, and so they rowed their ships up river to find those boats and destroy them.

Except our punts were not at Palfleot. They had been taken north and east, so that they were waiting for us in a reed-fringed dyke, but now was not the time to use them. Instead, as the Danes went ashore at Palfleot, we made a huddle on the sand, watching them, and they thought we were trapped, and now they were on the same side of the river as us and the two ships' crews outnumbered us by over two to one, and they had all the confidence in the world as they advanced from the burned pilings of Palfleot to kill us in the swamp.

They were doing exactly what I wanted them to do. And we now retreated. We went back raggedly, sometimes running to open a distance between us and the confident Danes. I counted seventy-six of them and we were only thirty strong because some of my men were with the hidden punts, and the Danes knew we were dead men and they hurried across the sand and creeks, and we had to go faster, ever faster, to keep them away from us. It began to rain, the drops carried on the freshening west wind and I kept looking into the rain until at last I saw a silver bar of light glint and spill across the swamp's edge and knew the incoming tide was beginning its long fast race across the barren flats. And still we went back, and still the Danes pursued us, but they were tiring now. A few shouted at us, daring us to stand and fight, but others had no breath to shout, just a savage intent to catch and kill us, but we were slanting eastwards now towards a line of buckthorn and reeds, and there, in a flooding creek, were our punts. We dropped into the boats, exhausted, and the marsh men poled us back down the creek that was a tributary of the River Bru which barred the northern part of the swamp, and the flat-bottomed craft took us fast south, against the current, hurrying us past the Danes who could only watch from a quarter-mile away and do nothing to stop us, and the farther we went from them, the more isolated they looked in that wide, barren place where the rain fell and the tide seethed as it flowed into the creek beds. The winddriven water was running deep into the swamp now, a tide made bigger by the full moon, and suddenly the Danes saw their danger and turned back towards Palfleot.

But Palfleot was a long way off, and we had already left the stream and were carrying the. punts to a smaller creek, one that ran down to the Pedredan, and that stream took us to where the blackened pilings leaned against the weeping sky, and where the Danes had tied their two ships. The two craft were guarded by only four men, and we came from the punts with a savage shout and drawn swords and the four men ran. The other Danes were still out in the swamp, only now it was not a swamp, but a tidal flat and they were wading through water.

And I had two ships. We hauled the punts aboard, and then the marsh men, divided between the ships, took the oars, and I steered one and Leofric took the other, and we rowed against that big tide towards Cynuit where the Danish ships were now unguarded except for a few men and a crowd of women and children who watched the two ships come and did not know they were crewed by their enemy. They must have wondered why so few oars bit the water, but how could they imagine that forty Saxons would defeat nearly eighty Danes? And so none opposed us as we ran the ships into the bank, and there I led my warriors ashore.

'You can fight us,' I shouted at the few ship-guards left, 'or you can live.'

I was in chain mail, with my new helmet. I was a warlord. 1 banged Serpent-Breath against the big shield and stalked towards them. 'Fight if you want!' I shouted. 'Come and fight us!'

They did not. They were too few and so they retreated south and could only watch as we burned their ships. It took most of the day to ensure that the ships burned down to their keels, but burn they did, and their fires were a signal to the western part of Wessex that Svein had been defeated. He was not at Cynuit that day, but somewhere to the south, and as the ships burned I watched the wooded hills in fear that he would come with hundreds of men, but he was still far off and the Danes at Cynuit could do nothing to stop us. We burned twenty-three ships, including the White Horse, and the twenty-fourth, which was one of the two we had captured, carried us away as evening fell. We took good plunder from the Danish camp; food, rigging ropes, hides, weapons and shields.

There were a score of Danes stranded on the low island of Palfleot. The rest had died in the rising water. The survivors watched us pass, but did nothing to provoke us, and I did nothing to hurt them.

We rowed on towards Æthelingaeg and behind us, under a darkening sky, the water sheeted the swamp where white gulls cried above the drowned men and where, in the dusk, two swans flighted northwards, their wings like drumbeats in the sky.

The smoke of the burned boats drifted to the clouds for three days, and on the second day Egwine took the captured ship down stream with forty men and they landed on Palfleot and killed all the surviving Danes, except for six who were taken prisoner, and five of those six were stripped of their armour and lashed to stakes in the river at low tide so that they drowned slowly on the flood. Egwine lost three men in that fight, but brought back mail, shields, helmets, weapons, arm rings and one prisoner who knew nothing except that Svein had ridden towards Exanceaster. That prisoner died on the third day, the day that Alfred had prayers said in thanks to God for our victory. For now we were safe. Svein could not attack us for he had lost his ships, Guthrum had no way of penetrating the swamp and Alfred was pleased with me.

'The king is pleased with you,' Beocca told me. Two weeks before, I thought, the king would have told me that himself. He would have sat with me by the water's edge and talked, but now a court had formed and the king was hedged with priests.

'He should be pleased,' I said. I had been practising weapon craft when Beocca soughs me out. We practised every day, using stakes instead of swords, and some men grumbled that they did not need to play at fighting, and those I opposed myself and, when they had been beaten down to the mud, I told them they needed to play more and complain less.

'He's pleased with you,' Beocca said, leading me down the path beside the river, 'but he thinks you are squeamish.'

'Mel Squeamish?'

'For not going to Palfleot and finishing the job.'

'The job was finished,' I said. 'Svein can't attack us without ships.'

'But not all the Danes drowned,.' Beocca said.

'Enough died,' I said. 'Do you know what they endured? The terror of trying to outrun the tide?' I thought of my own anguish in the swamp, the inexorable tide, the cold water spreading and the fear gripping the heart. 'They had no ships! Why kill stranded men?'

'Because they are pagans,' Beocca said, 'because they are loathed by God and by men, and because they are Danes.'

And only a few weeks ago,' I said, 'you believed they would become Christians and all our swords would be beaten into and points to plough fields.'

Beocca shrugged that off. 'So what will Svein do now?' he wanted to know.

'March around the swamp,' I said, 'and join Guthrum.'

'And Guthrum is in Cippanhamm.' We were fairly certain of that. New men were coming to the swamp and they all brought news. Much of it was rumour, but many had heard that Guthrum had strengthened Cippanhamm's walls and was wintering there. Large raiding parties still ravaged parts of Wessex, but they avoided the bigger towns in the south of the country where West Saxon garrisons had formed. There was one such garrison at Dornwaraceaster and another at Wintanceaster, and Beocca believed Alfred should go to one of those towns, but Alfred refused, reckoning that Guthrum would immediately besiege him. He would be trapped in a town, but the swamp was too big to be besieged and Guthrum could not hope to penetrate the marshes.

'You have an uncle in Mercia, don't you?' Beocca asked, changing the subject abruptly.

'Æthelred. He's my mother's brother, and an Ealdorman.'

He heard the flat tone of my voice. 'You're not fond of him?'

'I hardly know him.' I had spent some weeks in his house, just long enough to quarrel with his son who was also called Æthelred.

'Is he a friend of the Danes?'

I shook my head. 'They suffer him to live and he suffers them.'

'The king has sent messengers to Mercia,' Beocca said.

I grimaced. 'If he wants them to rise against the Danes they won't. They'll get killed.'

'He'd rather they brought men south in the springtime,' Beocca said and I wondered how a few Mercian warriors were supposed to get past the Danes to join us, but said nothing. 'We look to the springtime for our salvation,' Beocca went on, 'but in the meantime the king would like someone to go to Cippanhamm.'

'A priest?' I asked sourly, 'to talk to Guthrum?'

'A soldier,' Beocca said, 'to gauge their numbers.'

'So send me,' I offered.

Beocca nodded, then limped along the riverbank where the willow fish traps had been exposed by the falling tide. 'It's so different from Northumbria,' he said wistfully.

I smiled at that. 'You miss Ebensburg?'

'I would like to end my days at Lindisfarena,' he said. 'I would like to say my dying prayer on that island.' He turned and gazed at the eastern hills. 'The king would go to Cippanhamm himself,' he said, almost as an afterthought.

I thought I had misheard, then realised I had not. 'That's madness,' I protested.

'It's kingship,' he said.

'Kingship?'

'The Witan chooses the king,' Beocca said sternly, 'and the king must have the trust of the people. If Alfred goes to Cippanhamm and walks among his enemies, then folk will know he deserves to be king.'

'And if he's captured,' I said, 'then folk will know he's a dead king.'

'So you must protect him,' he said.

I said nothing. It was indeed madness, but Alfred was determined to show he deserved to be king.

He had, after all, usurped the throne from his nephew, and in those early years of his reign he was ever mindful of that.

'A small group will travel,' Beocca said, 'you, some other warriors, a priest and the king.'

'Why the priest?'

'To pray, of course.'

I sneered at that. 'You?'

Beocca patted his lamed leg. 'Not me. A young priest.'

'Better to send Iseult,' I said.

'No.'

'Why not? She's keeping the king healthy.' Alfred was in sudden good health, better than he had been in years, and it was all because of the medicines that Iseult made. The celandine and burdock she had gathered on the mainland had taken away the agony in his arse, while other herbs calmed the pains in his belly. He walked confidently, had bright eyes and looked strong.

'Iseult stays here,' Beocca said.

'If you want the king to live,' I said, 'send her with us.'

'She stays here,' Beocca said, 'because we want the king to live.'

It took me a few heartbeats to understand what he had said, and when I did realise his meaning I turned on him with such fury that he stumbled backwards. I said nothing, for I did not trust myself to speak, or perhaps I feared that speech would turn to violence. Beocca tried to look severe, but only looked fearful.

'These are difficult times,' he said plaintively, 'and the king can only put his trust in men who serve God. In men who are bound to him by their love of Christ.'

I kicked at an eel trap, sending it spinning over the bank into the river. 'For a time,' I said, 'I almost liked Alfred. Now he's got his priests back and you're dripping poison into him.'

'He …' Beocca began.

I turned on him, silencing him. 'Who rescued the bastard? Who burned Svein's ships? Who, in the name of your luckless god, killed Ubba? And you still don't trust me?'

Beocca was trying to calm me now, making flapping gestures. 'I fear you are a pagan,' he said, 'and your woman is assuredly a pagan.'

'My woman healed Edward,' I snarled, 'does that mean nothing?'

'It could mean,' he said, 'that she did the devil's work.'

I was astonished into silence by that.

'The devil does his work in the land,' Beocca said earnestly, 'and it would serve the devil well if Wessex were to vanish. The devil wants the king dead. He wants his own pagan spawn all across England! There is a greater war, Uhtred. Not the fight between Saxon and Dane, but between God and the devil, between good and evil! We are part of it!'

'I've killed more Danes than you can dream of,' I told him.

'But suppose,' he said, pleading with me now, 'that your woman has been sent by the devil? That the evil one allowed her to heal Edward so that the king would trust her? And then, when the king, in all innocence, goes to spy on the enemy, she betrays him!'

'You think she would betray him?' I asked sourly, 'or do you mean I might betray him?'

'Your love of the Danes is well known,' Beocca said stiffly, 'and you spared the men on Palfleot.'

'So you think I can't he trusted?'

'I trust you,' he said, without conviction. 'But other men?' he waved his palsied hand in an impotent gesture. 'But if Iseult is here,' he shrugged, not ending the thought.

'So she's to be a hostage,' I said.

'A surety, rather.'

'I gave the king my oath,' I pointed out.

'And you have sworn oaths before, and you are known as a liar, and you have a wife and child, yet live with a pagan whore, and you love the Danes as you love yourself, and do you really think we can trust you?'

This all came out in a bitter rush.

'I have known you, Uhtred,' he said, 'since you crawled on Bebbanburg's rush floors. I baptised you, taught you, chastised you, watched you grow, and I know you better than any man alive and I do not trust you.'

Beocca stared at me belligerently. 'If the king does not return, Uhtred, then your whore will be given to the dogs.'

He had delivered his message now, and he seemed to regret the force of it for he shook his head.

'The king should not go. You're right. It's a madness. It is stupidity! It is,' he paused, searching for a word, and came upon one of the worst condemnations in his vocabulary, 'it is irresponsible! But he insists, and if he goes then you must also go for you're the only man here who can pass as a Dane. But bring him back, Uhtred, bring him back, for he is dear to God and to all Saxons.'

Not to me, I thought, he was not dear to me. That night, brooding on Beocca's words, I was tempted to flee the swamp, to go away with Iseult, find a lord, give Serpent-Breath a new master, but Ragnar had been a hostage and so I had no friend among my enemies, and if I fled I would break my oath to Alfred and men would say Uhtred of Bebbanburg could never be trusted again and so I stayed.

I tried to persuade Alfred not to go to Cippanhamm. It was, as Beocca had said, irresponsible, but Alfred insisted.

'If I stay here,' he said, Then will say I hid from the Danes. Others face them, but I hide? No. Men must see me, must know that I live, and know that I fight.'

For once Ælswith and I were in agreement, and we both tried to keep him in Æthelingaeg, but Alfred would not be dissuaded. He was in a strange mood, suffused with happiness, utterly confident that God was on his side, and, because his sickness had abated, he was full of energy and confidence.

He took six companions. The priest was a young man called Adelbert who carried a small harp wrapped in leather. It seemed ridiculous to take a harp to the enemy, but Adelbert was famed for his music and Alfred blithely said that we should sing God's praises while we were among the Danes. The other four were all experienced warriors who had been part of his royal guard. They were called Osferth, Wulfrith, Beorth and the last was Egwine who swore to Ælswith that he would bring the king home, which made Ælswith throw a bitter glance at me. Whatever favour I had gained by Iseult's cure of Edward had evaporated under the influence of the priests.

We dressed for war in mail and helmets, while Alfred insisted on wearing a fine blue cloak, trimmed with fur, which made him conspicuous, but he wanted folk to see a king. The best horses were selected, one for each of us and three spare mounts, and we swam them across the river, then followed log roads until we came at last to firm ground close to the island where Iseult said Arthur was buried. I had left Iseult with Eanflaed who shared quarters with Leofric.

It was February now. There had been a spell of fine weather after the burning of Svein's fleet and I had thought we should travel then, but Alfred insisted on waiting until the eighth day of February, because that was the feast of Saint Cuthman, a Saxon saint from East Anglia, and Alfred reckoned that must be a propitious day. Perhaps he was right, for the day turned out wet and bitterly cold, and we were to discover that the Danes were reluctant to leave their quarters in the worst weather. We went at dawn and by mid morning we were in the hills overlooking the swamp which was half hidden by a mist thickened by the smoke from the cooking fires of the small villages.

'Are you familiar with Saint Cuthman?' Alfred asked me cheerfully.

'No, lord.'

'He was a hermit,' Alfred said. We were riding north, keeping on the high ground with the swamp to our left. 'His mother was crippled and so he made her a wheelbarrow.'

'A wheelbarrow? What could a cripple do with a wheelbarrow?'

‘No, no, no! He pushed her about in it! So she could be with him as he preached. He pushed her everywhere.'

'She must have liked that.'

'There's no written life of him that I know of,' Alfred said, 'but we must surely compose one. He could be a saint for mothers?'

'Or for wheelbarrows, lord.'

We saw our first evidence of the Danes just after midday. We were still on the high ground, but in a valley that sloped to the marshes we saw a substantial house with lime washed walls and thick, thatch.

Smoke came from the roof, while in a fenced apple orchard were a score of horses. No Dane would ever leave such a place unplundered, which suggested the horses belonged to them and that the farm was garrisoned.

'They're there to watch the swamp,' Alfred suggested.

'Probably.' I was cold. I had a thick woollen cloak, but I was still cold.

'We shall send men here,' Alfred said, 'and teach them not to steal apples.'

We stayed that night in a small village. The Danes had been there and the folk were frightened. At first, when we rode up the rutted track between the houses, they hid, thinking we were Danes, but when they heard our voices they crept out and stared at us as if we had just ridden down from the moon. Their priest was dead, killed by the pagans, so Alfred insisted that Adelbert hold a service in the burned-out remnants of the church. Alfred himself acted as precentor, accompanying his chanting with the priest's small harp.

'I learned to play as a child,' he told me. 'My stepmother insisted, but I'm not very good.'

'You're not,' I agreed, which he did not like.

'There is never enough time to practise,' he complained.

We lodged in a peasant's house. Alfred, reckoning that the Danes would have taken the harvest from wherever we visited, had laden the spare horses with smoked fish, smoked eels and oatcakes, so we provided most of the food and, after we had eaten, the peasant couple knelt to me and the woman tentatively touched the skirt of my mail coat.

'My children,' she whispered, 'there are two of them. My daughter is about seven years old and my boy is a little older. They are good children.'

'What of them?' Alfred intervened.

'The pagans took them, lord,' the woman said. She was crying. 'You can find them, lord,' she said, tugging my mail, 'you can find them and bring them back? My little ones? Please?'

I promised to try, but it was an empty promise for the children would have long gone to the slave market and, by now, would either be working on some Danish estate or, if they were pretty, sent overseas where heathen men pay good silver for Christian children. We learned that the Danes had come to the village shortly after Twelfth Night. They had killed, captured, stolen and ridden on southwards. A few days later they had returned, going hack northwards, driving a band of captives and a herd of captured horses laden with plunder. Since then the villagers had seen no Danes except for the few on the swamp's edge. Those Danes, they said, caused no trouble, perhaps because they were so few and dared not stir up the enmity of the country about them. We heard the same tale in other villages. The Danes had come, they had pillaged, then had gone back north. But on our third day we at last saw a force of the enemy riding on the Roman road which cuts straight eastwards across the hills from Badoum. There were close to sixty of them, and they rode hard in front of dark clouds and the gathering night.

'Going back to Cippanhamm,' Alfred said. It was a foraging party, and their packhorses carried nets stuffed with hay to feed their war horses, and I remembered my childhood winter in Readingum, when the Danes first invaded Wessex, and how hard it had been to keep horses and men alive in the cold. We had cut feeble winter grass and pulled down thatch to feed our horses, which still became skeletal and weak. I have often listened to men declare that all that is needed to win a war is to assemble men and march against the enemy, but it is never that easy. Men and horses must be fed, and hunger can defeat an army much faster than spears. We watched the Danes go north, then turned aside to a half-ruined barn that offered us shelter for the night.

It began to snow that night, a relentless soft snow, silent and thick, so that by dawn the world was white under a pale blue sky. I suggested we waited till the snow had thawed before we rode further, but Egwine, who came from this part of the country, said we were only two or three hours south of Cippanhamm and Alfred was impatient.

'We go,' he insisted. 'We go there, look at the town and ride away.'

So we rode north, our hooves crunching the newly fallen snow, riding through a world made new and clean. Snow clung to every twig and branch while ice skimmed the ditches and ponds. I saw a fox's trail crossing a field and thought that the spring would bring a plague of the beasts for there would have been no one to hunt them, and the lambs would die bloodily and the ewes would bleat pitifully.

We came in sight of Cippanhamm before midday, though the great pall of smoke, made by hundreds of cooking fires, had shown in the sky all morning. We stopped south of the town, just where the road emerged from a stand of oaks, and the Danes must have noticed us, but none came from the gates to see who we were. It was too cold for men to stir themselves. I could see guards on the walls, though none stayed there long, retreating to whatever warmth they could find between their short forays along the wooden ramparts. Those ramparts were bright with round shields painted blue and white and blood-red and, because Guthrum's men were there, black.

'We should count the shields,' Alfred said.

'It won't help,' I said. 'They carry two or three shields each and hang them on the walls to make it look as if they have more men.'

Alfred was shivering and I insisted we find some shelter. We turned back into the trees, following a path which led to the river and a mile or so upstream we came across a mill. The millstone had been taken away, but the building itself was whole and it was well made, with stone walls and a turf roof held up by stout rafters. There was a hearth in a room where the miller's family had lived, but I would not let Egwine light a fire in case the trickle of smoke brought curious Danes from the town.

'Wait till dark,' I said.

'We'll freeze by then,' he grumbled.

'Then you shouldn't have come,' I snapped.

'We have to get closer to the town,' Alfred said.

'You don't,' I said, 'I do.'

I had seen horses paddocked to the west of the walls and I reckoned I could take our best horse and ride about the town's western edge and count every horse I saw. That would give a rough estimate of the Danish numbers, for almost every man would have a horse. Alfred wanted to come, but I shook my head. It was pointless for more than one man to go, and sensible that the one man who did go should speak Danish, so I told him I would see him back in the mill before nightfall and then I rode north.

Cippanhamm was built on a hill that was almost encircled by the river, so I could not ride clear around the town, but I went as close to the walls as I dared and stared across the river and saw no horses on its farther bank which suggested that the Danes were keeping all of their beasts on the western side of the town. I went there, keeping in the snowy woods, and though the Danes must have seen me they could not be bothered to ride into the snow to chase one man, and so I was able to find the paddocks where their horses shivered. I spent the day counting. Most of the horses were in fields beside the royal compound and there were hundreds of them. By late afternoon I had estimated that there were twelve hundred, and those were only the ones I could see, and the best horses would be in the town, but my reckoning was good enough.

It would give Alfred an idea of how large Guthrum's force was. Say two thousand men? And elsewhere in Wessex, in the towns the Danes had occupied, there must be another thousand. That was a strong force, but not quite strong enough to capture all the kingdom.

That would have to wait until spring when reinforcements would come from Denmark or from the three conquered kingdoms of England.

I rode back to the watermill as dusk fell. There was a frost and the air was still. Three rooks flew across the river as I dismounted. I reckoned one of Alfred's men could rub my horse down; all I wanted was to find some warmth and it was plain Alfred had risked lighting a fire, for smoke was pouring out of the hole in the turf roof.

They were all crouched about the small fire and I joined them, stretching my hands to the flames.

'Two thousand men,' I said, 'more or less.'

No one answered.

'Didn't you hear me?' I asked, and looked around the faces.

There were five faces. Only five.

'Where's the king?' I asked.

'He went,' Adelbert said helplessly.

'He did what?'

'He went to the town,' the priest said. He was wearing Alfred's rich blue cloak and I assumed Alfred had taken Adelbert's plain garment.

I stared at him. 'You let him go?'

'He insisted,' Egwine said.

'How could we stop him?' Adelbert pleaded. 'He's the king!'

'You hit the bastard, of course,' I snarled. 'You hold him down till the madness passes. When did he go?'

'Just after you left,' the priest said miserably, 'and he took my harp,' he added.

'And when did he say he'd be back?'

'By nightfall.'

'It is nightfall,' I said. I stood and stamped out the fire. 'You want the Danes to come and investigate the smoke?' I doubted the Danes would come, but I wanted the damned fools to suffer.

'You,' I pointed to one of the four soldiers, 'rub my horse down. Feed it.'

I went back to the door. The first stars were bright and the snow glinted under a sickle moon.

'Where are you going?' Adelbert had followed me.

'To find the king, of course.'

If he lived. And if he did not, then Iseult was dead.

I had to beat on Cippanhamm's western gate, provoking a disgruntled voice from the far side demanding to know who I was.

'Why aren't you up on the ramparts?' I asked in return.

The bar was lifted and the gate opened a few inches. A face peered out, then vanished as I pushed the gate hard inwards, banging it against the suspicious guard. 'My horse went lame,' I said, 'and I've walked here.'

He recovered his balance and pushed the gate shut. Who are you?' he asked again.

'Messenger from Svein.'

'Sveinl' He lifted the bar and dropped it into place. 'Has he caught Alfred yet?'

'I'll tell Guthrum that news before I tell you.'

'Just asking,' he said.

'Where is Guthrum?' I asked. I had no intention of going anywhere near the Danish chieftain for, after my insults to his dead mother, the best I could hope for was a swift death, and the likelihood was a very slow one.

'He's in Alfred's hall,' the man said, and pointed south. 'That side of town, so you've still farther to walk.'

It never occurred to him that any messenger from Svein would never ride alone through Wessex, that such a man would come with an escort of fifty or sixty men, but he was too cold to think, and besides, with my long hair and my thick arm rings I looked like a Dane. He retreated into the house beside the gate where his comrades were clustered around a hearth and I walked on into a town made strange. Houses were missing, burned in the first fury of the Danish assault, and the large church by the market place on the hilltop was nothing but blackened beams touched white by the snow. The streets were frozen mud, and only I moved there, for the cold was keeping the Danes in the remaining houses. I could hear singing and laughter. Light leaked past shutters or glowed through smoke-holes in low roofs.

I was cold and I was angry. There were men here who could recognise me, and men who might recognise Alfred, and his stupidity had put us both in danger. Would he have been mad enough to go back to his own hall? He must have guessed that was where Guthrum would be living and he would surely not risk being recognised by the Danish leader, which suggested he would be in the town rather than the royal compound.

I was walking towards Eanflaed's old tavern when I heard the roars. They were coming from the east side of town and I followed the sound which led me to the nunnery by the river wall. I had never been inside the convent, but the gate was open and the courtyard inside was lit by two vast fires which offered some warmth to the men nearest the flames. And there were at least a hundred men in the courtyard, bellowing encouragement and insults at two other men who were fighting in the mud and melted snow between the fires. They were fighting with swords and shields, and every clash of blade against blade or of blade against wood brought raucous shouts. I glanced briefly at the fighters, then searched for faces in the crowd. I was looking for Haesten, or anyone else who might recognise me, but I saw no one, though it was hard to distinguish faces in the flickering shadows. There was no sign of any nuns and I assumed they had either fled, were dead or had been taken away for the conquerors'

amusement.

I slunk along the courtyard wall. I was wearing my helmet and its face-plate was an adequate disguise, but some men threw me curious glances, for it was unusual to see a helmeted warrior off a battlefield. In the end, seeing no one I recognised, I took the helmet off and hung it from my belt. The nunnery church had been turned into a feasting hall, but there was only a handful of drunks inside, oblivious to the noise outside. I stole half a loaf of bread from one of the drunks and took it back outside and watched the fighting.

Steapa Snotor was one of the two men. He no longer wore his mail armour, but was in a leather coat and he fought with a small shield and a long sword, but around his waist was a chain that led to the courtyard's northern side where two men held it and, whenever Steapa's opponent seemed to be in danger, they yanked on the chain to pull the huge Saxon off balance. He was being made to fight as Haesten had been fighting when I first discovered him, and doubtless Steapa's captors were making good money from fools who wanted to try their prowess against a captured warrior. Steapa's current opponent was a thin, grinning Dane who tried to dance around the huge man and slide his sword beneath the small shield, doing what I had done when I had fought Steapa, but Steapa was doggedly defending himself, parrying each blow and, when the chain allowed him, counterattacking fast.

Whenever the Danes jerked him backwards the crowd jeered and once, when the men yanked the chain too hard and Steapa turned on them, only to be faced by three long spears, the crowd gave him a great cheer. He whipped back to parry the next attack, then stepped backwards, almost to the spear points, and the thin man followed fast, thinking he had Steapa at a disadvantage, but Steapa suddenly checked, slammed the shield down onto his opponent's blade and brought his left hand around, sword hilt foremost, to hit the man on the head. The Dane went down, Steapa reversed the sword to stab and the chain dragged him off his feet and the spears threatened him with death if he finished the job. The crowd liked it. He had won.

Money changed hands. Steapa sat by the fire, his grim face showing nothing, and one of the men holding the chain shouted for another opponent. 'Ten pieces of silver if you wound him! Fifty if you kill him!'

Steapa, who probably did not understand a word, just stared at the crowd, daring another man to take him on, and sure enough a half drunken brute came grinning from the crowd. Bets were made as Steapa was prodded to his feet. It was like a bull-baiting, except Steapa was being given only one opponent at a time. They would doubtless have set three or four men on him, except that the Danes who had taken him prisoner did not want him dead so long as there were still fools willing to pay to fight him.

I was sidling around the courtyard's edge, still looking at faces. 'Six pennies?' a voice said behind me and I turned to see a man grinning beside a door. It was one of a dozen similar doors, evenly spaced along the lime washed wall.

'Six pennies?' I asked, puzzled.

'Cheap,' he said, and he pushed back a small shutter on the door and invited me to look inside.

I did. A tallow candle lit the tiny room which must have been where a nun had slept, and inside was a low bed and on the bed was a naked woman who was half covered by a man who had dropped his breeches. 'He won't be long,' the man said.

I shook my head and moved away from the shutter.

'She was a nun here,' the man said. 'Nice and young? Pretty too. Screams like a pig usually.'

'No,' I said.

'Four pennies? She won't put up a fight. Not now she won't.'

I walked on, convinced I was wasting my time. Had Alfred been and gone? More likely, I thought grimly, the fool had gone back to his hall and I wondered if I dared go there, but the thought of Guthrum's revenge deterred me. The new fight had started. The Dane was crouching low, trying to cut Steapa's feet from under him, but Steapa was swatting his blows easily enough and I sidled past the men holding his chains and saw another room off to my left, a large room, perhaps where the nuns had eaten, and a glint of gold in the light of its dying fire drew me inside.

The gold was not metal. It was the gilding on the frame of a small harp that had been stamped on so hard that it broke. I looked around the shadows and saw a man lying in a heap at the far end and went to him. It was Alfred. He was barely conscious, but he was alive and, so far as I could see, unwounded, but he was plainly stunned and I dragged him to the wall and sat him up. He had no cloak and his boots were gone.

I left him there, went back to the church and found a drunk to befriend. I helped him to his feet, put my arm around his shoulders and persuaded him I was taking him to his bed, then took him through the back door to the latrine yard of the nunnery where I punched him three times in the belly and twice-in the face, then carried his hooded cloak and tall boots back to Alfred.

The king was conscious now. His face was bruised. He looked up at me without showing any surprise, then rubbed his chin.

'They didn't like the way I played,' he said.

'That's because the Danes like good music,' I said. 'Put these on.' I threw the boots beside him, draped him with the cloak and made him pull the hood over his face. 'You want to die?' I asked him angrily.

'I want to know about my enemies,' he said.

'And I found out for you,' I said. `There are roughly two thousand of them.'

'That's what I thought,' he said, then grimaced. 'What's on this cloak?'

'Danish vomit,' I said.

He shuddered. 'Three of them attacked me,' he sounded surprised. 'They kicked and punched me.'

'I told you, the Danes like good music,' I said, helping him to his feet. 'You're lucky they didn't kill you.'

'They thought I was Danish,' he said, then spat blood that trickled from his swollen lower lip.

'Were they drunk?' I asked. You don't even look like a Dane.'

'I pretended I was a musician who couldn't speak,' he mouthed silently at me, then grinned bloodily, proud of his deception. I did not grin back and he sighed. 'They were very drunk, but I need to know their mood, Uhtred. Are they confident? Are they readying to attack?' He paused to wipe more blood from his lips. 'I could only find that out by coming to see them for myself. Did you see Steapa?'

'Yes.'

'I want to take him back with us.'

'Lord,' I said savagely, 'you are a fool. He's in chains. He's got half a dozen guards.'

'Daniel was in a lion's den, yet he escaped. Saint Paul was imprisoned, yet God freed him.'

'Then let God look after Steapa,' I said. 'You're coming back with me. Now.'

He bent to relieve a pain in his belly. 'They punched me in the stomach,' he said as he straightened.

In the morning, I thought, he would have a rare black eye to display. He flinched as a huge cheer sounded from the courtyard and I guessed Steapa had either died or downed his last opponent.

'I want to see my hall,' Alfred said stubbornly.

'Why?'

'I'm a man who would look at his own home. You can come or stay.'

'Guthrum's there) You want to be recognised? You want to die?'

'Guthrum will be inside, and I just want to look at the outside.'

He would not be dissuaded and so I led him through the court yard to the street, wondering if I should simply pick him up and carry him away, but in his obdurate mood he would probably struggle and shout until men came to find out the cause of the noise.

'I wonder what happened to the nuns,' he said as we left the nunnery.

'One of them is being whored in there for pennies,' I said.

'Oh, dear God.' He made the sign of the cross and turned back and I knew he was thinking of rescuing the woman, so I dragged him onwards.

'This is madness!' I protested.

'It is a necessary madness,' he said calmly, then stopped to lecture me. 'What does Wessex believe?

It thinks I am defeated, it thinks the Danes have won, it readies itself for the spring and the coming of more Danes. So they must learn something different. They must learn that the king lives, that he walked among his enemies and that he made fools of them.'

'That he got given a bloody nose and a black eye,' I said.

'You won't tell then that,' he said, 'any more than you'll tell folk about that wretched woman who hit me with an eel. We must give men hope, Uhtred, and in the spring that hope will blossom into victory. Remember Boethius, Uhtred, remember Boethius! Never give up hope.'

He believed it. He believed that God was protecting him, that he could walk among his enemies without fear or harm, and to an extent the was right for the Danes were well supplied with ale, birch wine and mead, and most were much too drunk to care about a bruised man carrying a broken harp.

No one stopped us going into the royal compound, but there were six black-cloaked guards at the hall door and I refused to let Alfred get close to them.

'They'll take one look at your bloodied face,' I said, 'and finish what the others began.'

'Then let me at least go to the church.'

'You want to pray?' I asked sarcastically.

'Yes,' he said simply.

I tried to stop him. 'If you die here,' I said, 'then Iseult dies.'

'That wasn't my doing,' he said.

'You're the king, aren't you?'

'The bishop thought you would join the Danes,' he said. 'And others agreed.'

'I have no friends left among the Danes,' I said. 'They were your hostages and they died.'

'Then I shall pray for their pagan souls,' he said, and pulled away from me and went to the church door where he instinctively pushed the hood off his head to show respect. I snatched it back over his hair, shadowing his bruises. He did not resist, but just pushed the door open and made the sign of the cross.

The church was being used to shelter more of Guthrum's men. There were straw mattresses, heaps of chain mail, stacks of weapons and a score of men and women, gathered around a newly-made hearth in the nave. They were playing dice and none took any particular interest in our arrival until someone shouted that we should shut the door.

'We're leaving,' I said to Alfred. 'You can't pray here.'

He did not answer. He was gazing reverently to where the altar had been, and where a half-dozen horses were now tethered.

'We're leaving!' I insisted again.

And just then a voice hailed me. It was a voice full of astonishment and I saw one of the dice players stand and stare at me. A dog ran from the shadows and began to jump up and down, trying to lick me, and I saw the dog was Nihtgenga and that the man who had recognised me was Ragnar. Earl Ragnar, my friend. Who I had thought was dead.

Nin

i e

Ragnar embraced me. There were tears in both our eyes and for a moment neither of us could speak, though I retained enough sense to look behind me to make sure Alfred was safe. He was squatting beside the door, deep in the shadow of a bale of wool, with his cloak's hood drawn over his face.

'I thought you were dead!' I said to Ragnar.

'I hoped you would come,' he said at the same moment, and for a time we both talked and neither listened, and then Brida walked from the back of the church and I watched her, seeing a woman instead of a girl, and she laughed to see me and gave me a decorous kiss.

'Uhtred,' she said my name as a caress. We had been lovers once, though we had been little more than children then. She was Saxon, but she had chosen the Danish side to be with Ragnar. The other women in the hall were hung with silver, garnet, jet, amber and gold, but Brida wore no jewellery other than an ivory comb that held her thick black hair in a pile. 'Uhtred,' she said again.

'Why aren't you dead?' I asked Ragnar. He had been a hostage, and the hostages' lives had been forfeit the moment Guthrum crossed the frontier.

‘Wulfhere liked us,' Ragnar said. He put an arm around my shoulder and drew me to the central hearth where the fire blazed.

'This is Uhtred,' he announced to the dice players, 'a Saxon, which makes him scum, of course, but he is also my friend and my brother. Ale,' he pointed to jars, 'wine. Wulfhere let us live.'

'And you let him live?'

'Of course we did! He's here. Feasting with Guthrum.'

'Wulfhere? Is he a prisoner?'

'He's an ally!' Ragnar said, thrusting a pot into my hand and pulling me down beside the fire. 'He's with us now.' He grinned at me, and I laughed for the sheer joy of finding him alive. He was a big man, golden-haired, open-faced, and as full of mischief, life and kindness as his father had been.

'Wulfhere used to talk to Brida,' Ragnar went on, 'and through her to me. We liked each other. Hard to kill a man you like.'

'You persuaded him to change sides?'

'Didn't need a great deal of persuasion,' Ragnar said. 'He could see we were going to win, and by changing sides he keeps his land, doesn't he? Are you going to drink that ale or just stare at it?'

I pretended to drink, letting some of the ale drip down my beard, and I remembered Wulfhere telling me that when the Danes came we must all make what shifts we could to survive. But Wulfhere?

Alfred's cousin and the Ealdorman of Wiltunscir? He had changed sides? So how many other thegns had followed his example and now served the Danes?

'Who's that?' Brida asked. She was staring at Alfred. He was in shadow, but there was something oddly mysterious about the way he squatted alone and silent.

'A servant,' I said.

'He can come by the fire.'

'He cannot,' I said harshly. 'I'm punishing him.'

'What did you do?' Brida called to him in English. His face came up and he stared at her, but the hood still shadowed him.

'Speak, you bastard,' I said, 'and I'll whip you till your bones show.' I could just see his eyes in the hood's shadow. 'He insulted me,' I spoke in Danish again, 'and I've sworn him to silence, and for every word he utters he receives ten blows of the whip.'

That satisfied them. Ragnar forgot the strange hooded servant and told me how he had persuaded Wulfhere to send a messenger to Guthrum, promising to spare the hostages, and how Guthrum had warned Wulfhere when the attack would come to make sure that the ealdorman had time to remove the hostages from Alfred's revenge. That, I thought, was why Wulfhere had left so early on the morning of the attack. He had known the Danes were coming.

‘You call him an ally,' I said. 'Does that make him just a friend? Or a man who will fight for Guthrum?'

'He's an ally,' Ragnar said, 'and he's sworn to fight for us. At least he's sworn to fight for the Saxon king.'

'The Saxon king?' I asked, confused, 'Alfred?'

'Not Alfred, no. The true king. The boy who was the other one's son.'

Ragnar meant Æthelwold, who had been heir to Alfred's brother, King Ethelred, and of course the Danes would want Æthelwold. Whenever they captured a Saxon kingdom they appointed a Saxon as king, and that gave their conquest a cloak of legality, though the Saxon never lasted long. Guthrum, who already called himself King of East Anglia, wanted to be King of Wessex too, but by putting Æthelwold on the throne he might attract other West Saxons who could convince themselves they were fighting for the true heir. And once the fight was over and Danish rule established Æthelwold would be quietly killed.

'But Wulfhere will fight for you?' I persisted.

'Of course he will if he wants to keep his land,' Ragnar said, then grimaced. 'But what fighting? We just sit here like sheep and do nothing!'

'It's winter.'

'Best time to fight. Nothing else to do.' He wanted to know where I had been since Yule and I said I had been deep inside Defnascir. He assumed I had been making sure my family was safe, and he also assumed I had now come to Cippanhamm to join him.

'You're not sworn to Alfred, are you?' he asked.

'Who knows where Alfred is?' I evaded the question.

'You were sworn to him,' he said reproachfully.

'I was sworn to him,' I said, truthfully enough, 'but only for a year, and that year has long ended.'

That was no lie, I just did not tell Ragnar I had sworn myself to Alfred once again.

'So you can join me?' he asked eagerly. 'You'll give me your oath?'

I took the question lightly, though in truth it worried me.

'You want my oath?' I asked, 'just so I can sit here like a sheep doing nothing?'

'We make some raids,' Ragnar said defensively, 'and men are guarding the swamp. That's where Alfred is. In the swamps. But Svein will dig him out.' So Guthrum and his men had yet to hear that Svein's fleet was ashes beside the sea.

'So why are you just sitting here?' I asked.

'Because Guthrum won't divide his army,' Ragnar said. I half smiled at that because I remembered Ragnar's grandfather advising Guthrum never to divide an army again. Guthrum had done that at Iusc's Hill and that had been the first victory of the West Saxons over the Danes. He had done it again when he abandoned Werham to attack Exanceaster, and the part of his army that went by sea was virtually destroyed by the storm.

'I've told him,' Ragnar said, 'that we should split the army into a dozen parts. Take a dozen more towns and garrison them. All those places in southern Wessex, we should capture them, but he won't listen.'

'Guthrum holds the north and east,' I said, as if I was defending him.

'And we should have the rest! But instead we're waiting till spring in hope more men will join us.

Which they will. There's land here, good land. Better than the land up north.' He seemed to have forgotten the matter of my oath. I knew he would want me to join him, but instead he talked of what happened in Northumbria, how our enemies, Kjartan and Sven, thrived in Dunholm, and how that father and son dared not leave the fortress for fear of Ragnar's revenge. They had taken his sister captive and, so far as Ragnar knew, they held her still, and Ragnar, like me, was sworn to kill them. He had no news of Bebbanburg other than that my treacherous uncle still lived and held the fortress.

'When we've finished with Wessex,' Ragnar promised me, 'we shall go north. You and I together.

We'll carry swords to Dunholm.'

'Swords to Dunholm,' I said and raised my pot of ale.

I did not drink much, or if I did it seemed to have little effect. I was thinking, sitting there, that with one sentence I could finish Alfred for ever. I could betray him, I could have him dragged in front of Guthrum and then watch as he died. Guthrum would even forgive me the insults to his mother if I gave him Alfred, and thus I could finish Wessex, for without Alfred there was no man about whom the fyrd would muster. I could stay with my friend, Ragnar, I could earn more arm rings, I could make a name that would be celebrated wherever Northmen sailed their long ships, and all it would take was one sentence.

And I was so tempted that night in Cippanhamm's royal church. There is such joy in chaos. Stow all the world's evils behind a door and tell men that they must never, ever, open the door, and it will be opened because there is pure joy in destruction. At one moment, when Ragnar was bellowing with laughter and slapping my shoulder so hard that it hurt, I felt the words form on my tongue. That is Alfred, I would have said, pointing at him, and all my world would have changed and there would have been no more England. Yet, at the last moment, when the first word was on my tongue, I choked it back. Brida was watching me, her shrewd eyes calm, and I caught her gaze and I thought of Iseult. In a year or two, I thought, Iseult would look like Brida. They had the same tense beauty, the same dark colouring and the same smouldering fire in the soul. If I spoke, I thought, Iseult would be dead, and I could not bear that. And I thought of Æthelflaed, Alfred's daughter, and knew she would be enslaved, and also knew that wherever the remnants of the Saxons gathered about their fires of exile my name would be cursed. I would be Uhtredaerwe for ever, the man who destroyed a people.

'What were you about to say?' Brida asked.

'That we have never known such a hard winter in Wessex.'

She gazed at me, not believing my answer. Then she smiled.

'Tell me, Uhtred,' she spoke in English, 'if you thought Ragnar was dead then why did you come here?'

'Because I don't know where else to be,' I said.

'So you came here? To Guthrum? Whom you insulted?'

So they knew about that. I had not expected them to know and I felt a surge of fear. I said nothing.

'Guthrum wants you dead,' Brida said, speaking in Danish now.

'He doesn't mean it,' Ragnar said.

'He does mean it,' Brida insisted.

'Well, I won't let him kill Uhtred,' Ragnar said. 'You're here now!' He slapped me on the back again and glared at his men as if daring any of them to betray my presence to Guthrum. None of them moved, but they were nearly all of them drunk and some already asleep.

'You're here now,' Brida said, 'yet not so long ago you were fighting for Alfred and insulting Guthrum.'

'I was on my way to Defnascir,' I said, as if that explained anything.

'Poor Uhtred,' Brida said. Her right hand fondled the black and white fur at the back of Nihtgenga's neck. 'And I thought you'd be a hero to the Saxons.'

'A hero? Why?'

'The man who killed Ubba?'

'Alfred doesn't want heroes,' I said, loudly enough for him to hear, 'only saints.'

'So tell us about Ubba!' Ragnar demanded, and so I had to describe Ubba's death, and the Danes, who love a good story of a fight, wanted every detail. I told the tale well, making Ubba into a great hero who had almost destroyed the West Saxon army, and I said he had been fighting like a god, and told how he had broken our shield wall with his great axe. I described the burning ships, their smoke drifting over the battle slaughter like a cloud from the netherworld, and I said I had found myself facing Ubba in his victory charge. That was not true, of course, and the Danes knew it was not true. I had not just found myself opposing Ubba, but had sought him out, but when a story is told it must be seasoned with modesty and the listeners, understanding that custom, murmured approval. 'I have never known such fear,' I said, and I told how we had fought, Serpent-Breath against Ubba's axe, and how he had chopped my shield into firewood, and then I described, truthfully, how he had lost his footing in the spilled guts of a dead man. The Danes about the fire sighed with disappointment. 'I cut the tendons of his arm,' I said, chopping my left hand into the crook of my right elbow to show where I had cut him, 'and then beat him down.'

'He died well?' a man asked anxiously.

'As a hero,' I said, and I told how I had put the axe back into his dying hand so that he would go to Valhalla. 'He died very well,' I finished.

'He was a warrior,' Ragnar said. He was drunk now. Not badly drunk, but tired drunk. The fire was dying, thickening the shadows at the western end of the church where Alfred sat. More stories were told, the fire died and the few candles guttered. Men were sleeping, and still I sat until Ragnar lay back and began to snore.

I waited longer, letting the room go to sleep, and only then did I go back to Alfred. 'We go now,' I said. He did not argue.

No one appeared to notice as we went into the night, closing the door quietly behind us. 'Who were you talking with?' Alfred asked me.

'Earl Ragnar.'

He stopped, puzzled. 'Wasn't he one of the hostages?'

'Wulfhere let them live,' I said.

'He let them live?' he asked, astonished.

'And Wulfhere is now on Guthrum's side.' I gave him the had news. 'He's here, in the hall. He's agreed to fight for Guthrum.'

'Here?' Alfred could scarce believe what I said. Wulfhere was his cousin, he had married Alfred's niece, he was family. 'He's here?'

'He's on Guthrum's side,' I said harshly.

He just stared at me. 'No,' he mouthed the word, rather than said it. 'And Æthelwold?' he asked.

'He's a prisoner,' I said.

'A prisoner!' he asked the question sharply, and no wonder, for Æthelwold had no value to the Danes as a prisoner unless he had agreed to become their token king on the West Saxon throne.

'A prisoner,' I said. It was not true, of course, but I liked Æthelwold and I owed him a favour. 'He's a prisoner,' I went on, 'and there's nothing we can do about it, so let's get away from here.' I pulled him towards the town, but too late, for the church door opened and Brida came out with Nihtgenga.

She told the dog to stay at her heels as she walked towards me. Like me she was not drunk, though she must have been very cold for she wore no cloak over her plain blue woollen dress. The night was brittle with frost, but she did not shiver. 'You're going?' She spoke in English. 'You're not staying with us?'

'I have a wife and child,' I said.

She smiled at that. 'Whose names you have not mentioned all evening, Uhtred. So what happened?'

I gave no answer and she just stared at me, and there was something very unsettling in her gaze. 'So what woman is with you now?' she asked.

'Someone who looks like you,' I admitted.

She laughed at that. 'And she would have you fight for Alfred?'

'She sees the future,' I said, evading the question. 'She dreams.’

Brida stared at me. Nihtgenga whined softly and she put down a hand to calm him. 'And she sees Alfred surviving?'

'More than surviving,' I said. 'She sees him winning.' Beside me Alfred stirred and I hoped he had the sense to keep his head lowered.

'Winning?'

'She sees a green hill of dead men,' I said, 'a white horse, and Wessex living again.'

'Your woman has strange dreams,' Brida said, 'but you never answered my first question, Uhtred. If you thought Ragnar was dead, why did you come here?'

I had no ready answer so made none.

'Who did you expect to find here?' she asked.

'You?' I suggested glibly.

She shook her head, knowing I lied. 'Why did you come?' I still had no answer and Brida smiled sadly. 'If I were Alfred,' she said, 'I would send a man who spoke Danish to Cippanhamm, and that man would go back to the swamp and tell all he had seen.'

'If you think that,' I said, 'then why don't you tell them?' I nodded towards Guthrum's black-cloaked men guarding the hall door.

'Because Guthrum is a nervous fool,' she said savagely. 'Why help Guthrum? And when Guthrum fails, Ragnar will take command.'

'Why doesn't he command now?'

'Because he is like his father. He's decent. He gave his word to Guthrum and he won't break his word. And tonight he wanted you to give him an oath, but you didn't.'

'I do not want Bebbanburg to be a gift of the Danes,' I answered. She thought about that, and understood it. 'But do you think,' she asked scornfully, 'that the West Saxons will give you Bebbanburg? It's at the other end of Britain, Uhtred, and the last Saxon king is rotting in a swamp.'

'This will give it to me,' I said, pulling back my cloak to show Serpent-Breath's hilt.

'You and Ragnar can rule the north,' she said.

'Maybe we will,' I said. 'So tell Ragnar that when this is all finished, when all is decided, I shall go north with him. I shall fight Kjartan. But in my own time.'

'I hope you live to keep that promise,' she said, then leaned forward and kissed my cheek. Then, without another word, she turned and walked back to the church.

Alfred let out a breath. 'Who is Kjartan?'

'An enemy,' I said shortly. I tried to lead him away, but he stopped me.

He was staring at Brida who was nearing the church. 'That is the girl who was with you at Wintanceaster?'

'Yes.' He was talking of the time when I had first come to Wessex and Brida had been with me.

'And does Iseult truly see the future?'

'She has not been wrong yet.'

He made the sign of the cross, then let me lead him back through the town. It was quieter now, but he would not go with me to the western gate, insisting we return to the nunnery where, for a moment, we both crouched near one of the dying fires in the courtyard to get what warmth we could from the embers. Men slept in the nunnery church, but the courtyard was now deserted and quiet, and Alfred took a piece of half-burning wood and, using it as a torch, went to the row of small doors that led to the nuns' sleeping cells. One door had been fastened with two hasps and a short length of thick chain and Alfred paused there.

'Draw your sword,' he ordered me.

When Serpent-Breath was naked he unwound the chain from the hasps and pushed the door inwards. He entered cautiously, pushing the hood back from his face. He held the torch high, and in its light I saw the big man huddled on the floor.

'Steapa!' Alfred hissed.

Steapa was only pretending to be asleep and he uncoiled from the floor with wolf-like speed, lashing out at Alfred, and I rammed the sword towards his breast, but then he saw Alfred's bruised face and he froze, oblivious of the blade. 'Lord?'

'You're coming with us,' Alfred said.

'Lord!' Steapa fell to his knees in front of his king.

'It's cold out there,' Alfred said. It was freezing inside the cell as well. 'You can sheath your sword, Uhtred.' Steapa looked at me and seemed vaguely surprised to find I was the man he had been fighting when the Danes came. 'The two of you will be friends,' Alfred said sternly, and the big man nodded.

'And we have one other person to fetch,' Alfred said, 'so come.'

'One other person?' I asked.

'You spoke of a nun,' Alfred said.

So I had to find the nun's cell, and she was still there, lying crushed against the wall by a Dane who was snoring flabbily. The flame-light showed a small, frightened face half-hidden by the Dane's beard. His beard was black and her hair was gold, pale gold, and she was awake and, seeing us, gasped, and that woke the Dane who blinked in the flame-light and then snarled at us as he tried to throw off the thick cloaks serving as blankets. Steapa hit him and it was like the sound of a bullock being clubbed, wet and hard at the same time. The man's head snapped back and Alfred pulled the cloaks away and the nun tried to hide her nakedness. Alfred hurriedly put the cloaks back. He had been embarrassed and I had been impressed, for she was young and. very beautiful and I wondered why such a woman would waste her sweetness on religion.

'You know who I am?' Alfred asked her.

She shook her head.

'I am your king,' he said softly, 'and you will come with us, sister.'

Her clothes were long gone, so we swathed her in the heavy cloaks. The Dane was dead by now, his throat cut by Wasp-Sting, and I had found a pouch of coins strung around his neck on a leather thong.

'That money goes to the church,' Alfred said.

'I found it,' I said, 'and I killed him.'

'It is the money of sin,' he said patiently, 'and must be redeemed.'

He smiled at the nun. 'Are there any other sisters here?' he asked.

'Only me,' she said in a small voice.

'And now you are safe, sister.' He straightened. 'We can go.'

Steapa carried the nun who was called Hild. She clung to him, whimpering, either from the cold or, more likely, from the memory of her ordeal.

We could have captured Cippanhamm that night with a hundred men. It was so bitterly cold that no guards stood on the ramparts. The gate sentries were in a house by the wall, crouched by the fire, and all the notice they took of the bar being lifted was to shout a bad-tempered question wanting to know who we were.

'Guthrum's men,' I called back, and they did not bother us further.

A half-hour later we were in the watermill, reunited with Father Adelbert, Egwine and the three soldiers.

'We should give thanks to God for our deliverance,' Alfred said to Father Adelbert, who had been aghast to see the blood and bruises on the king's face. 'Say a prayer, father,' Alfred ordered.

Adelbert prayed, but I did not listen. I just crouched by the fire, thought I would never be warm again, and then slept.

It snowed all next day. Thick snow. We made a fire, careless that the Danes might see the smoke, for no Dane was going to struggle through the bitter cold and deepening snow to investigate one small, far-off trickle of grey against a grey sky.

Alfred brooded. He spoke little that day, though once he frowned and asked me if it could really he true about Wulfhere. 'We didn't see him with Guthrum,' he added plaintively, desperately hoping that the Ealdorman had not betrayed him.

'The hostages lived,' I said.

'Dear God,' he said, convinced by that argument, and leaned his head against the wall. He watched the snow through one of the small windows. 'He's family!' he said after a while, then fell silent again.

I fed the horses the last of the hay we had brought with us, then sharpened my swords for lack of anything else to do. Hild wept. Alfred tried to comfort her, but he was awkward and had no words, and oddly it was Steapa who calmed her. He talked to her softly, his voice a deep grumble, and when Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting were as sharp as I could make them, and as the snow sifted endlessly onto a silent world, I brooded like Alfred. I thought of Ragnar wanting my oath. I thought of him wanting my allegiance.

The world began in chaos and it will end in chaos. The gods brought the world into existence, and they will end it when they fight among themselves, but in between the chaos of the world's birth and the chaos of the world's death is order, and order is made by oaths, and oaths bind us like the buckles of a harness. I was hound to Alfred by an oath, and before I gave that oath I had wanted to bind myself to Ragnar, but now I felt affronted that he had even asked me. That was pride growing in me and changing me. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg, slayer of Ubba, and while I would give an oath to a king I was reluctant to make an oath to an equal. The oath-giver is subservient to the man who accepts the oath. Ragnar would have said I was a friend, he would treat me like a brother, but his assumption that I would give him an oath demonstrated that he still believed I was his follower. I was a lord of Northumbria, but he was a Dane, and to a Dane all Saxons are lesser men, and so he had demanded an oath. If I gave him an oath then he would be generous, but I would be expected to show gratitude, and I could only ever hold Bebbanburg because he allowed me to hold it. I had never thought it all through before, but suddenly, on that cold day, I understood that among the Danes I was as important as my friends, and without friends I was just another landless, masterless warrior. But among the Saxons I was another Saxon, and among the Saxons I did not need another man's generosity.

'You look thoughtful, Uhtred,' Alfred interrupted my reverie.

'I was thinking, lord,' I said, 'that we need warm food.' I fed the fire, then went outside to the stream where I knocked away the skim of ice and scooped water into a pot. Steapa had followed me outside, not to talk, but to piss, and I stood behind him.

'At the witanegemot,' I said, 'you lied about Cynuit.'

He tied the scrap of rope that served as a belt and turned to look at me. 'If the Danes had not come,' he said in his growling voice, 'I would have killed you.'

I did not argue with that, for he was probably right.

'At Cynuit,' I said instead, 'when Ubba died, where were you?'

'There.'

'I didn't see you,' I said. 'I was in the thick of the battle, but I didn't see you.'

'You think I wasn't there?' he was angry.

'You were with Odda the Younger?' I asked, and he nodded. 'You were with him,' I guessed,

'because his father told you to protect him?' He nodded again. And Odda the Younger,' I said, 'stayed a long way from any danger. Isn't that right?'

He did not answer, but his silence told me I was right. He decided he had nothing more to say to me so started back towards the mill, but I pulled on his arm to stop him. He was surprised by that. Steapa was so big and so strong and so feared that he was unused to men using force on him, and I could see the slow anger burning in him. I fed it. 'You were Odda's nursemaid,' I sneered. 'The great Steapa Snotor was a nursemaid. Other men faced and fought the Danes and you just held Odda's hand.'

He just stared at me. His face, so tight-skinned and expressionless, was like an animal's gaze, nothing there but hunger and anger and violence. He wanted to kill me, especially after I used his nickname, but I understood something more about Steapa Snotor. He was truly stupid. He would kill me if he was ordered to kill me, but without someone to instruct him he did not know what to do, so I thrust the pot of water at hire. 'Carry that inside,' I told him. He hesitated. 'Don't stand there like a dumb ox!' I snapped. 'Take it! And don't spill it.' He took the pot. 'It has to go on the fire,' I told him,

'and next time we fight the Danes you'll be with me.'

'You?'

'Because we are warriors,' I said, 'and our job is to kill our enemies, not be nursemaids to weaklings.'

I collected firewood, then went inside to find Alfred staring at nothing and Steapa sitting beside Hild who now seemed to be consoling him rather than being consoled. I crumbled oatcakes and dried fish into the water and stirred the mess with a stick. It was a gruel of sorts and tasted horrible, but it was hot.

That night it stopped snowing and next morning we went home.

Alfred need not have gone to Cippanhamm. Anything he learned there he could have discovered by sending spies, but he had insisted on going himself and he came back more worried than before. He had learned some good things, that Guthrum did not have the men to subjugate all Wessex and so was waiting for reinforcements, but he had also learned that Guthrum was trying to turn the nobility of Wessex to his side. Wulfhere was sworn to the Danes, who else?

'Will the fyrd of Wiltunscir fight for Wulfhere?' he asked us.

Of course they would fight for Wulfhere. Most of the men in Wiltunscir were loyal to their lord, and if their lord ordered them to follow his banner to war then they would march. Those men who were in the parts of the shire not occupied by the Danes might go to Alfred, but the rest would do what they always did, follow their lord. And other Ealdormen, seeing that Wulfhere had not lost his estates, would reckon that their own future, and their family's safety, lay with the Danes. The Danes had ever worked that way. Their armies were too small and too disorganised to defeat a great kingdom so they recruited lords of the kingdom, flattered them, even made them into kings, and only when they were secure did they turn on those Saxons and kill them.

So back in Æthelingaeg Alfred did what he did best. He wrote letters. He wrote letters to all his nobility, and messengers were sent into every corner of Wessex to find Ealdormen, thegns and bishops, and deliver the letters. I am alive, the scraps of parchment said, and after Easter I shall take Wessex from the pagans, and you will help me. We waited for the replies.

'You must teach me to read,' Iseult said when I told her about the letters.

‘Why?'

'It is a magic,' she said.

'What magic? So you can read psalms?'

'Words are like breath,' she said, 'you say them and they're gone. But writing traps them. You could write down stories, poems.'

'Hild will teach you,' I said, and the nun did, scratching letters in the mud. I watched them sometimes and thought they could have been taken for sisters except one had hair black as a raven's wing and the other had hair of pale gold.

So Iseult learned her letters and I practised the men with their weapons and shields until they were too tired to curse me, and we also made a new fortress. We restored one of the beamwegs that led south to the hills at the edge of the swamp, and where that log road met dry land we made a strong fort of earth and tree-trunks. None of Guthrum's men tried to stop the work, though we saw Danes watching us from the higher hills, and by the time Guthrum understood what we were doing the fort was finished.

In late February a hundred Danes came to challenge it, but they saw the thorn palisade protecting the ditch, saw the strength of the log wall behind the ditch, saw our spears thick against the sky and rode away.

Next day I took sixty men to the farm where we had seen the Danish horses. They were gone, and the farm was burned out. We rode inland, seeing no enemy. We found newborn lambs slaughtered by foxes, but no Danes, and from that day on we rode ever deeper into Wessex, carrying the message that the king lived and fought, and some days we met Danish bands, but we only fought if we outnumbered them for we could not afford to lose men.

Ælswith gave birth to a daughter whom she and Alfred called Æthelgifu. Ælswith wanted to leave the swamp. She knew that Huppa of Thornsaeta was holding Dornwaraceaster for the Ealdorman had replied to Alfred's letter saying that the town was secure and, as soon as Alfred demanded it, the fyrd of Thornsaeta would march to his aid. Dornwaraceaster was not so large as Cippanhamm, but it had Roman walls and Ælswith was tired of living in the marshes, tired of the endless damp, of the chill mists, and she said her newborn baby would die of the cold, and that Edward's sickness would come back, and Bishop Alewold supported her. He had a vision of a large house in Dornwaraceaster, of warm fires and priestly comfort, but Alfred refused. If he moved to Dornwaraceaster then the Danes would immediately abandon Cippanhamm and besiege Alfred and starvation would soon threaten the garrison, but in the swamp there was food. In Dornwaraceaster Alfred would be a prisoner of the Danes, but in the swamp he was free, and he wrote more letters, telling Wessex he lived, that he grew stronger and that after Easter, but before Pentecost, he would strike the pagans.

It rained that late winter. Rain and more rain. I remember standing on the muddy parapet of the new fort and watching the rain just falling and falling. Mail coats rusted, fabrics rotted and food went mouldy. Our huts fell apart and we had no men skilled in making new ones. We slid and splashed through greasy mud, our clothes were never dry, and still grey swathes of rain marched from the west.

Thatch dripped, huts flooded, the world was sullen.

We ate well enough, though as more men came to Æthelingaeg, the food became scarcer, but no one starved and no one complained except Bishop Alewold who grimaced whenever he saw another fish stew. There were no deer left in the swamp, all had been netted and eaten, but at least we had fish, eels and wildfowl, while outside the swamp, in those areas the Danes had plundered, folk starved.

We practised with our weapons, fought mock battles with staves, watched the hills, and welcomed the messengers who brought news. Burgweard, the fleet commander, wrote from Hamtun saying that the town was garrisoned by Saxons, but that Danish ships were off the coast.

'I don't suppose he's fighting them,' Leofric remarked glumly when he heard that news.

'He doesn't say so,' I said.

'Doesn't want to get his nice ships dirty,' Leofric guessed. 'At least he still has the ships.'

A letter came from a priest in distant Kent saying that Vikings from Lundene had occupied Contwaraburg and others had settled on the Isle of Sceapig, and that the Ealdorman had made his peace with the invaders. News came from Stith Seaxa of more Danish raids, but also a reassurance from Arnulf, Ealdorman of Suth Seaxa, that his fyrd would gather in the spring. He sent a gospel book to Alfred as a token of his loyalty, and for days Alfred carried the book until the rain soaked into the pages and made the ink run. Wiglaf, Ealdorman of Sumorsaete, appeared in early March and brought seventy men. He claimed to have been hiding in the hills south of Barnum and Alfred ignored the rumours which said Wiglaf had been negotiating with Guthrum. All that mattered was that the Ealdorman had come to Æthelingaeg and Alfred gave him command of the troops that continually rode inland to shadow the Danes and to ambush their forage parties. Not all the news was so encouraging.

Wilfrith of Hamptonscir had fled across the water to Frankia, as had a score of other Ealdormen and thegns.

But Odda the Younger, Ealdorman of Defnascir, was still in Wessex. He sent a priest who brought a letter reporting that the Ealdorman was holding Exanceaster. 'God he praised,' the letter read, 'but there are no pagans in the town'.

'So where are they?' Alfred asked the priest. We knew that Svein, despite losing his ships, had not marched to join Guthrum, which suggested he was still skulking in Defnascir.

The priest, a young man who seemed terrified of the king, shrugged, hesitated, then stammered that Svein was close to Exanceaster.

'Close?' the king asked.

'Nearby,' the priest managed to say.

'They besiege the town?' Alfred asked.

'No, lord.'

Alfred read the letter a second time. He always had great faith in the written word and he was trying to find some hint of the truth that had escaped him in the first reading. 'They are not in Exanceaster,' he concluded, 'but the letter does not say where they are. Nor how many they are. Nor what they're doing.'

'They are nearby, lord,' the priest said hopelessly. 'To the west, I think.'

'The west?'

'I think they're to the west.'

'What's to the west?' Alfred asked me.

'The high moor,' I said.

Alfred threw the letter down in disgust. 'Maybe you should go to Defnascir,' he told me, and find out what the pagans are doing.'

'Yes, lord,' I said.

'It will be a chance to discover your wife and child,' Alfred said. There was a sting there. As the winter rains fell the priests hissed their poison into Alfred's ears and he was willing enough to hear their message, which was that the Saxons would only defeat the Danes if God willed it. And God, the priests said, wanted us to be virtuous. And Iseult was a pagan, as was I, and she and I were not married, while I had a wife, and so the accusation was whispered about the swamp that it was Iseult who stood between Alfred and victory. No one said it openly, not then, yet Iseult sensed it. Hild was her protector in those days, because Hild was a nun, a Christian, and a victim of the Danes, but many thought Iseult was corrupting Hild. I pretended to be deaf to the whispers until Alfred's daughter told me of them.

Æthelflaed was almost seven and her father's favourite child. Ælswith was fonder of Edward, and in those wet winter days she worried about her son's health and the health of her newborn child, which gave Æthelflaed a deal of freedom. She would stay at her father's side much of the time, but she also wandered about Æthelingaeg where she was spoiled by soldiers and villagers. She was a bright ripple of sunlight in those rain-sodden days. She had golden hair, a sweet face, blue eyes and no fear. One day I found her at the southern fort, watching a dozen Danes who had come to watch us. I told her to go back to Æthelingaeg and she pretended to obey me, but an hour later, when the Danes had gone, I found her hiding in one of the turf-roofed shelters behind the wall.

'I hoped the Danes would come,' she told me.

'So they could take you away?'

'So I could watch you kill them.'

It was one of the rare days when it was not raining. There was sunshine on the green hills and I sat on the wall, took Serpent-Breath from her fleece-lined scabbard and began sharpening her two edges with a whetstone. Æthelflaed insisted on trying the whetstone and she laid the long blade on her lap and frowned in concentration as she drew the stone down the sword. 'How many Danes have you killed?' she asked.

'Enough.'

'Mama says you don't love Jesus.'

'We all love Jesus,' I said evasively.

'If you loved Jesus,' she said seriously, 'then you could kill more Danes. What's this?' She had found the deep nick in one of Serpent-Breath's edges.

'It's where she hit another sword,' I said. It had happened at Cippanhamm during my fight with Steapa and his huge sword had bitten deep into Serpent-Breath.

'I'll make her better,' she said, and worked obsessively with the whetstone, trying to smooth the nick's edges. 'Mama says Iseult is an aglaecwif.' She stumbled over the word, then grinned in triumph because she had managed to say it. I said nothing. An aglaecwif was a fiend, a monster. 'The bishop says it too,' Æthelflaed said earnestly. 'I don't like the bishop.'

'You don't?'

'He dribbles.' She tried to demonstrate and managed to spit onto Serpent-Breath. She rubbed the blade. 'Is Iseult an aglaecwif?'

'Of course not. She made Edward better.'

'Jesus did that, and Jesus sent me a baby sister.' She scowled because all her efforts had made no impression on the nick in Serpent-Breath.

'Iseult is a good woman,' I said.

'She's learning to read. I can read.'

'You can?'

'Almost. If she reads then she can be a Christian. I'd like to be an aglaecwif.'

'You would?' I asked, surprised.

For answer she growled at me and crooked a small hand so that her fingers looked like claws. Then she laughed. 'Are those Danes?' She had seen some horsemen coming from the south.

'That's Wiglaf,' I said.

'He's nice.'

I sent her back to Æthelingaeg on Wiglaf's horse and I thought of what she had said and wondered, for the thousandth time, why I was among Christians who believed I was an offence to their god. They called my gods dwolgods, which meant false gods, so that made me Uhtredarwe, living with an aglaecwif and worshipping dwolgods. I flaunted it, though, always wearing my hammer amulet openly, and that night Alfred, as ever, flinched when he saw it. He had summoned me to his hall where I found him bent over a tall board. He was playing against Beocca, who had the larger set of pieces. It seems a simple game, tall, where one player has a king and a dozen other pieces, and the other has double the pieces, but no king, and then you move the pieces about the chequered board until one or other player has all his wooden pieces surrounded. I had no patience for it, but Alfred was fond of the game, though when I arrived he seemed to be losing and so was relieved to see me.

'I want you to go to Defnascir,' he said.

'Of course, lord.'

'I fear your king is threatened, lord,' Beocca said happily.

'Never mind,' Alfred said irritably. 'You're to go to Defnascir,' he said, turning back to me, 'but Iseult must stay here.'

I bridled at that. 'She's to be a hostage again?' I asked.

'I need her medicines,' Alfred said.

'Even though they're made by an aglaecwif?'

He gave me a sharp look. 'She is a healer,' he said, 'and that means she is God's instrument, and with God's help she will come to the truth. Besides, you must travel fast and don't need a woman for company. You will go to Defnascir and find Svein, and once you've found him you will instruct Odda the Younger to raise the fyrd. Tell him Svein must he driven from the shire, and once Odda has achieved that, he is to come here with his household troops. He commands my bodyguard, he should be here.'

'You want me to give Odda orders?' I asked, partly in surprise, partly with scorn.

'I do,' Alfred said, 'and I order you to make your peace with him.'

'Yes, lord,' I replied.

He heard the sarcasm in my voice. 'We are all Saxons, Uhtred, and now, more than ever, is the time to heal our wounds.'

Beocca, realising that defeating Alfred at tall would not help the king's mood, was taking the pieces from the board. 'A house divided against itself,' he interjected, 'will be destroyed. Saint Matthew said that.'

'Praise God for that truth,' Alfred said, 'and we must be rid of Svein.' That was a greater truth.

Alfred wanted to march against Guthrum after Easter, but he could scarcely do that if Svein's forces were behind him. 'You find Svein,' the king told me,' and Steapa will accompany you.'

'Steapa!'

'He knows the country,' Alfred said, 'and I have told him he is to obey you.'

'It's best that two of you go,' Beocca said earnestly. 'Remember that Joshua sent two spies against Jericho.'

'You're delivering me to my enemies,' I said bitterly, though when I thought about it I decided that using me as a spy made sense. The Danes in Defnascir would be looking out for Alfred's scouts, but I could speak the enemy's language and could pass for one of them and so I was safer than anyone else in Alfred's force. As for Steapa, he was from Defnascir, he knew the country and he was Odda's sworn man, so he was best suited for carrying a message to the Ealdorman.

And so the two of us rode south from Æthelingaeg on a day of driving rain.

Steapa did not like me and I did not like him and so we had nothing to say to each other except when I suggested what. Path we take, and he never disagreed. We kept close to the large road, the road the Romans had made, though I went cautiously for such roads were much used by Danish bands seeking forage or plunder. This was also the route Svein must take if he marched to join Guthrum, but we saw no Danes. We saw no Saxons either. Every village and farm on the road had been pillaged and burned so that we journeyed through a land of the dead.

On the second day Steapa headed westwards. He did not explain the sudden change of direction, but doggedly pushed up into the hills and I followed him because he knew the countryside and I supposed he was taking the small paths that would lead to the high bleakness of Daerentmora. He rode urgently, his hard face grim, and I called to him once that we should take more care in case there were Danish forage parties in the small valleys, but he ignored me. Instead, almost at a gallop, he rode down into one of those small valleys until he came in sight of a farmstead.

Or what had been a farmstead. Now it was wet ashes in a green place. A deep green place where narrow pastures were shadowed by tall trees on which the very first haze of spring was just showing.

Flowers were thick along the pasture edges, but there were none where the few small buildings had stood. There were only embers and the black smear of ash in mud, and Steapa, abandoning his horse, walked among the ashes. He had lost his great sword when the Danes captured him at Cippanhamm, so now he carried a huge war axe and he prodded the wide blade into the dark piles.

I rescued his horse, tied both beasts to the scorched trunk of an ash that had once grown by the farmyard, and watched him. I said nothing, for I sensed that one word would release all his fury. He crouched by the skeleton of a dog and just stared at the fire-darkened hones for a few minutes, then reached out and stroked the bared skull. There were tears on Steapa's face, or perhaps it was the rain that fell softly from low cloud.

A score of people had once lived there. A larger house had stood at the southern end of the settlement and I explored its charred remains, seeing where the Danes had dug down by the old posts to find hidden coins. Steapa watched me. He was by one of the smaller patches of charred timbers and I guessed he had grown up there, in a slave hovel. He did not want me near him, and I pointedly stayed away, wondering if I dared suggest to him that we rode on. But he began digging instead, hacking the damp red soil with his huge war axe and scooping the earth out with bare hands until he had made a shallow grave for the dog. It was a skeleton now. There were still patches of fur on the old bones, but the flesh had been eaten away so that the ribs were scattered, so this had all happened weeks before.

Steapa gathered the bones and laid them tenderly in the grave.

That was when the people came. You can ride through a landscape of the dead and see no one, but they will see you. Folk hide when enemies come. They go up into the woods and they wait there, and now three men came from the trees.

'Steapa,' I said. He turned on me, furious that I had interrupted him, then saw I was pointing westwards.

He gave a roar of recognition and the three men, who were holding spears, ran towards him. They dropped their weapons and they hugged the huge man, and for a time they all spoke together, but then they calmed down and I took one aside and questioned him. The Danes had come soon after Yule, he told me. They had come suddenly, before anyone was even aware that there were pagans in Defnascir.

These men had escaped because they had been felling a beech tree in a nearby wood, and they had heard the slaughter. Since then they had been living in the forests, scared of the Danes who still rode about Defnascir in search of food. They had seen no Saxons.

They had buried the folk of the farm in a pasture to the south, and Steapa went there and knelt in the wet grass. 'His mother died,' the' man told me. He spoke English with such a strange accent that I continually had to ask him to repeat himself, but I understood those three words. 'Steapa was good to his mother,' the man said. 'He brought her money. She was no slave any more.'

'His father?'

'He died long time back. Long time.'

I thought Steapa was going to dig up his mother, so I crossed and stood in front of him. 'We have a job to do,' I said.

He looked up at me, his harsh face expressionless.

'There are Danes to kill,' I said. 'The Danes who killed folk here must be killed themselves.'

He nodded abruptly, then stood, towering over me again. He leaned the blade of his axe, and climbed into his saddle. 'There are Danes to kill,' he said and, leaving his mother in her cold grave, we went to find them.

Ten

We rode south. We went cautiously, for folk said the Danes were still seen in this part of the shire, though we saw none. Steapa was silent until, in a river meadow, we rode past a ring of stone pillars, one of the mysteries left behind by the old people. Such rings stand all across England and some are huge, though this one was a mere score of lichen-covered stones, none taller than a man, standing in a circle some fifteen paces wide. Steapa glanced at them, then astonished me by speaking.

'That's a wedding,' he said.

'A wedding?'

'They were dancing,' he growled, 'and the devil turned them to stone.'

'Why did the devil do that?' I asked cautiously.

'Because they wed on a Sunday, of course. Folk never should wed on a Sunday, never! Everyone knows that.' We rode on in silence, then, surprising me again, he began to talk about his mother and father and how they had been serfs of Odda the Elder. 'But life was good for us,' he said.

'It was?'

'Ploughing, sowing, weeding, harvest, threshing.'

'But Ealdorman Odda didn't live back there,' I said, jerking my thumb towards Steapa's destroyed homestead.

'No! Not him!' Steapa was amused I should even ask such a question. 'He wouldn't live there, not him! Had his own big hall. Still does. But he had a steward there. Man to give us orders. He was a big man! Very tall!'

I hesitated. 'But your father was short?'

Steapa looked surprised. 'How did you know that?'

'I just guessed.'

'He was a good worker, my father.'

'Did he teach you to fight?'

'He didn't, no. No one did. I just learned myself.'

The land was less damaged the farther we went south. And that was strange, for the Danes had come this way. We knew that, for folk said the Danes were still in the southern part of the shire, but life suddenly seemed normal. We saw men spreading dung on fields, and other men ditching or hedging. There were lambs in the pastures. To the north the foxes had become fat on dead lambs, but here the shepherds and their dogs were winning that ceaseless battle.

And the Danes were in Cridianton.

A priest told us that in a village huddled near a great oak-covered hill beside a stream. The priest was nervous because he had seen my long hair and arm rings and he presumed I was a Dane, and my northern accent did not persuade him otherwise, but he was reassured by Steapa. The two talked, and the priest gave his opinion that it would be a wet summer.

'It will,' Steapa agreed. 'The oak greened before the ash.'

'Always a sign,' the priest said.

'How far is Cridianton?' I broke into the conversation.

'A morning's walk, lord.'

'You've seen the Danes there?' I asked.

'I've seen them, lord, I have,' he said.

'Who leads them?'

'Don't know, lord.'

'They have a banner?' I asked.

He nodded. 'It hangs on the bishop's hall, lord. It shows a white horse.'

So it was Svein. I did not know who else it could have been, but the white horse confirmed that Svein had stayed in Defnascir rather than try to join Guthrum. I twisted in the saddle and looked at the priest's village that was unscarred by war. No thatch had been burned, no granaries emptied and the church was still standing. 'Have the Danes come here?' I asked.

'Oh yes, lord, they came. Came more than once.'

'Did they rape? Steal?'

‘No, lord. But they bought some grain. Paid silver for it.'

Well-behaved Danes. That was another strange thing.

'Are they besieging Exanceaster?'

I asked. That would have made a sort of sense. Cridianton was close enough to Exanceaster to give most of the Danish troops shelter while the rest invested the larger town.

'No, lord,' the priest said, 'not that I know of.'

'Then what are they doing?' I asked.

'They're just in Cridianton, lord.'

'And Odda is in Exanceaster?'

'No, lord. He's in Ocmundtun. He's with Lord Harald.'

I knew the shire-reeve's hall was in Ocmundtun that lay beneath the northern edge of the great moor. But Ocmundtun was also a long journey from Cridianton and no place to be if a man wanted to harry the Danes.

I believed the priest when he said Svein was at Cridianton, but we still rode there to see for ourselves. We used wooded, hilly tracks and came to the town at mid afternoon and saw the smoke rising from cooking fires, then saw the Danish shields hanging from the palisade. Steapa and I were hidden in the high woods and could see men guarding the gate, and other men standing watch in a pasture where forty or fifty horses were grazing on the first of the spring grass.

I could see Odda the Elder's hall where I had been reunited with Mildrith after the fight at Cynuit, and I could also see a triangular Danish banner flying above the larger hall that was the bishop's home. The western gate was open, though well guarded, and despite the sentries and the shields on the wall the town looked like a place at peace, not at war. There should be Saxons on this hill, I thought, Saxons watching the enemy, ready to attack. instead the Danes were living undisturbed.

'How far to Ocmundtun?' I asked Steapa.

'We can make it by nightfall.'

I hesitated. If Odda the Younger was at Ocmundtun then why go there? He was my enemy and sworn to my death. Alfred had given me a scrap of parchment on which he had written words commanding Odda to greet me peaceably, but what force did writing have against hatred?

'He won't kill you,' Steapa said, surprising me again. He had evidently guessed my thoughts. 'He won't kill you,' he said again.

'Why not?'

'Because I won't abide him killing you,' Steapa said and turned his horse west.

We reached Ocmundtun at dusk. It was a small town built along a river and guarded by a high spur of limestone on which a stout palisade offered a refuge if attackers came. No one was on the limestone spur now and the town, which had no walls, looked placid. There might be war in Wessex, but Ocmundtun, like Cridianton, was evidently at peace. Harald's hall was close to the fort on its hill and no one challenged us as we rode into the forecourt where servants recognised Steapa. They greeted him warily, but then a steward came from the hall door and, seeing the huge man, clapped his hands twice in a sign of delight.

'We heard you were taken by the pagans,' the steward said.

'I was.'

'They let you go?'

'My king freed me,' Steapa growled as though he resented the question. He slid from his horse and stretched. 'Alfred freed me.'

'Is Harald here?' I asked the steward.

'My lord is inside,' the steward was offended that I had not called the reeve “lord”.

'Then so are we,' I said, and led Steapa into the hall. The steward flapped at us because custom and courtesy demanded that he seek his lord's permission for us to enter the hall, but I ignored him.

A fire burned in the central hearth and dozens of rushlights stood on the platforms at the hall's edges. Boar spears were stacked against the wall on which hung a dozen deerskins and a bundle of valuable pine-marten pelts. A score of men were in the hall, evidently waiting for supper, and a harpist played at the far end. A pack of hounds rushed to investigate us and Steapa beat them off as we walked to the fire to warm ourselves.

'Ale,' Steapa said to the steward.

Harald must have heard the noise of the hounds for he appeared at a door leading from the private chamber at the back of the hall. He blinked when he saw its. He had thought the two of us were enemies, then he had heard that Steapa was captured, yet here we were, side by side. The hall fell silent as he limped towards us. It was only a slight limp, the result of a spear wound in some battle that had also taken two fingers of his sword hand.

'You once chided me,' he said, 'for carrying weapons into your hall. Yet you bring weapons into mine.'

'There was no gatekeeper,' I said.

'He was having a piss, lord,' the steward explained.

'There are to be no weapons in my hall,' Harald insisted.

That was customary. Men get drunk in hall and can do enough damage to each other with the knives we use to cut meat, and drunken men with swords and axes can turn a supper table into a butcher's yard. We gave the steward our weapons, then I hauled off my mail coat and told the steward to hang it on a frame to dry, then have a servant clean its links.

Harald formally welcomed us when our weapons were gone. He said the hall was ours and that we should eat with him as honoured guests. 'I would hear your news,' he said, beckoning a servant who brought us pots of ale.

'Is Odda here?' I demanded.

'The father is, yes. Not the son.'

I swore. We had come here with a message for Ealdorman Odda, Odda the Younger, only to discover that it was the wounded father, Odda the Elder, who was in Ocmundtun.

'So where is the son?' I asked.

Harald was offended by my brusqueness, but he remained courteous. 'The ealdorman is in Exanceaster.'

'Is he besieged there?'

'No.'

'And the Danes are in Cridianton?'

'They are.'

'And are they besieged?' l knew the answer to that, but wanted to hear Harald admit it.

'No,' he said.

I let the ale pot drop.

‘We come from the king,' I said. I was supposedly speaking to Harald, but I strode down the hall so that the men on the platforms could hear me.

‘We come from Alfred,' I said, 'and Alfred wishes to know why there are Danes in Defnascir. We burned their ships, we slaughtered their ship-guards and we drove them from Cynuit, yet you allow them to live here? Why?'

No one answered. There were no women in the hall, for Harald was a widower who had not remarried, and so the supper guests were all his warriors or else thegns who led men of their own.

Some looked at me with loathing, for my words imputed cowardice to them, while others looked down at the floor. Harald glanced at Steapa as if seeking the big man's support, but Steapa just stood by the fire, his savage face showing nothing. I turned back to stare at Harald.

'Why are there Danes in Defnascir?' I demanded.

'Because they are welcome here,' a voice said behind me.

I turned to see an old man standing in the door. White hair showed beneath the bandage that swathed his head, and he was so thin and so weak that he had to lean on the door frame for support.

At first I did not recognise him, for when I had last spoken to him he had been a big man, well-built and vigorous, but Odda the Elder had taken an axe blow to the skull at Cynuit and he should have died from such a wound, yet somehow he had lived, and here he was, though now he was skeletal, pale, haggard and feeble.

'They are here,' Odda said, 'because they are welcome. As are you, Lord Uhtred, and you, Steapa.'

A woman was tending Odda the Elder. She had tried to pull him away from the door and take him back to his bed, but now she edged past him into the hall and stared at me. Then, seeing me, she did what she had done the very first time she saw me. She did what she had done when she came to marry me. She burst into tears.

It was Mildrith.

Mildrith was robed like a nun in a pale grey dress, belted with rope, over which she wore a large wooden cross. She had a close fitting grey bonnet from which strands of her fair hair escaped. She stared at me, burst into tears, made the sign of the cross and vanished. A moment later Odda the Elder followed her, too frail to stand any longer, and the door closed.

'You are indeed welcome here,' Harald said, echoing Odda's words.

'But why are the Danes welcome here?' I asked.

Because Odda the Younger had made a truce. Harald explained it as we ate. No one in this part of Defnascir had heard how Svein's ships had been burned at Cynuit, they only knew that Svein's men, and their women and children, had marched south, burning and plundering, and Odda the Younger had taken his troops to Exanceaster and he had prepared for a siege, but instead Svein had offered to talk. The Danes, quite suddenly, had stopped raiding. Instead they had settled in Cridianton and sent an embassy to Exanceaster, and Svein and Odda had made their private peace.

'We sell them horses,' Harald said, 'and they pay well for them. Twenty shillings a stallion, fifteen a mare.'

'You sell them horses,' I said flatly.

'So they will go away,' Harald explained.

Servants threw a-big birch log onto the fire. Sparks exploded outwards, scattering the hounds who lay just beyond the ring of hearth stones.

'How many men does Svein lead?' I asked.

'Many,' Harald said.

'Eight hundred?' I asked, 'nine?' Harald shrugged. 'They came in twenty-four ships,' I went on, 'only twenty-four. So how many men can he have? No more than a thousand, and we killed a few, and others must have died in the winter.'

'We think he has eight hundred,' Harald said reluctantly.

'And how many men in the fyrd? Two thousand?'

'Of which only four hundred are seasoned warriors,' Harald said.

That was probably true. Most men of the fyrd are farmers, while every Dane is a sword-warrior, but Svein would never have pitted his eight hundred men against two thousand. Not because he feared losing, but because he feared that in gaining victory he would lose a hundred men. That was why he had stopped plundering and made his truce with Odda, because in southern Defnascir he could recover from his defeat at Cynuit. His men could rest, feed, make weapons and get horses. Svein was husbanding his men and making them stronger.

‘It was not my choice,' Harald said defensively. 'The Ealdorman ordered it.'

'And the king,' I retorted, 'ordered Odda to drive Svein out of Defnascir.'

'What do we know of the king's orders?' Harald asked bitterly, and it was my turn to give him news, to tell how Alfred had escaped Guthrum and was in the great swamp.

'And some time after Easter,' I said, 'we shall gather the shire fyrds and we shall cut Guthrum into pieces.'

I stood. 'There will be no more horses sold to Svein,' I said it loudly so that every man in the big hall could hear me.

'Uthr …' Harald began, then shook his head. He had doubtless been about to say that Odda the Younger, Ealdorman of Defnascir, had ordered the horses to be sold, but his voice trailed away.

'What are the king's orders?' I demanded of Steapa.

‘No more horses,' he thundered.

There was silence until Harald irritably gestured at the harpist who struck a chord and began playing a melancholy tune. Someone began singing, but no one joined in and his voice trailed away.

'I must look to the sentinels,' Harald said, and he threw me an inquisitive look which I took as an invitation to join him, and so I buckled on my swords and then walked with him down Ocmundtun's long street to where three spearmen stood guard beside a wooden hut. Harald talked to them for a moment, then led me further east, away from the light of the sentinels' fire. A moon silvered the valley, lighting the empty road until the track vanished among trees.

'I have thirty fighting men,' Harald said suddenly.

He was telling me he was too weak to fight.

'How many men does Odda have in Exanceaster?' I asked.

'A hundred? Hundred and twenty?'

'The fyrd should have been raised.'

'I had no orders,' Harald said,

'Did you seek any?'

'Of course I did.' He was angry with me now. "I told Odda we should drive Svein away, but he wouldn't listen.'

'Did he tell you the king ordered the fyrd raised?'

'No.' Harald paused, staring down the moonlit road. 'We heard nothing of Alfred, except that he'd been defeated and was hiding. And we heard the Danes were all across Wessex, and that more were gathering in Mercia.'

'Odda didn't think to attack Svein when he landed?'

‘He thought to protect himself,' Harald said, 'and sent me to the Tamur.'

The Tamur was the river which divided Wessex from Cornwalum.

'The Britons are quiet?' I asked.

'Their priests are telling them not to fight us.'

'But priests or no priests,' I said, 'they'll cross the river if the Danes look like winning.'

'Aren't they winning already?' Harald asked bitterly.

'We're still free men,' I said.

He nodded at that. Behind us, in the town, a dog began howling and he turned as if the noise indicated trouble, but the howling stopped with a sharp yelp. He kicked a stone in the road.

'Svein frightens me,' he admitted suddenly.

'He's a frightening man,' I agreed.

'He's clever,' Harald said, 'clever, strong and savage.'

'A Dane,' I said dryly.

'A ruthless man,' Harald went on.

'He is,' I agreed, 'and do you think that after you have fed him, supplied him with horses and given him shelter, he will leave you alone?'

'No,' he said, 'but Odda believes that.'

Then Odda was a fool. He was nursing a wolf cub that would tear him to shreds when it was strong enough.

'Why didn't Svein march north to join Guthrum?' I asked.

'I wouldn't know.'

But I knew. Guthrum had been in England for years now. He had tried to take Wessex before, and he had failed, but now, on the very brink of success, he had paused. Guthrum the Unlucky, he was called, and I suspected he had not changed. He was wealthy, led many men, but he was cautious.

Svein, though, came from the Norsemen's settlements in Ireland and was a very different creature. He was younger than Guthrum, less wealthy than Guthrum, and led fewer men, but he was undoubtedly the better warrior. Now, bereft of his ships, he was weakened, but he had persuaded Odda the Younger to give him refuge and he gathered his strength so that when he did meet Guthrum he would not he a defeated leader in need of help, but a Spear-Dane of power. Svein, I thought, was a far more dangerous man than Guthrum, and Odda the Younger was only making him more dangerous.

'Tomorrow,' I said, 'we must start raising the fyrd. Those are the king's orders.'

Harald nodded. I could not see his face in the darkness, but I sensed he was not happy, yet he was a sensible man and must have known that Svein had to be driven out of the shire.

'I shall send the messages,' he said, 'but Odda might stop the fyrd assembling. He's made his truce with Svein and he won't want me breaking it. Folk will obey him before they obey me.'

‘And what of his father?' I asked. 'Will they obey him?'

'They will,' he said, 'but he's a sick man. You saw that. It's a miracle he lives at all.'

'Maybe because my wife nurses him?'

'Yes,' he said, and fell silent. There was something odd in the air now, something unexpressed, a discomfort. 'Your wife nurses him well,' he finished awkwardly.

'He's her godfather,' I said.

'So he is.'

'It is good to see her,' I said, not because I meant it, but because it was the proper thing to say and I could think of nothing else. 'And it will be good to see my son,' I added with more warmth.

'Your son.' Harald said flatly.

'He's here, isn't he?'

'Yes.' Harald flinched. He turned away to look at the moon and I thought he would say no more, but then he summoned his courage and looked back to me. 'Your son, Lord Uhtred,' he said, 'is in the churchyard.'

It took a few heartbeats for that to make sense, and then it did not make any sense at all, but left me confused. I touched my hammer amulet. 'In the churchyard?'

'It is not my place to tell you.'

'But you will tell me,' I said, and my voice sounded like Steapa's growl.

Harald stared at the moon-touched river, silver-white beneath the black trees. 'Your son died,' he said. He waited for my response, but I neither moved nor spoke. 'He choked to death.'

'Choked?'

'A pebble,' Harald said. 'He was just a baby. He must have picked the pebble up and swallowed it.'

'A pebble?' I asked.

'A woman was with him, but ...' Harald's voice tailed away. 'She tried to save him, but she could do nothing. He died.'

'On Saint Vincent's Day,' I said.

'You knew?'

'No,' I said, 'I didn't know.' But Saint Vincent's Day had been the day when Iseult drew Alfred's son, the Ætheling Edward, through the earth. And somewhere, Iseult had told me, a child must die so that the king's heir, the Ætheling, could live.

And it had been my child. Uhtred the Younger. Whom I had hardly known. Edward had been given breath and Uhtred had twitched and fought and gasped and died.

'I'm sorry,' Harald said. 'It was not my place to tell you, but you needed to know before you saw Mildrith again.'

'She hates me,' I said bleakly.

'Yes,' he said, 'she does.' He paused. 'I thought she would go mad with grief, but God has preserved her. She would like ...'

'Like what?'

'To join the sisters at Cridianton. When the Danes leave. They have a nunnery there, a small house.'

I did not care what Mildrith did. 'And my son is buried here?'

'Under the yew tree,' he turned and pointed, 'beside the church.'

So let him stay there, I thought. Let him rest in his short grave to wait the chaos of the world's ending.

'Tomorrow,' I said, 'we raise the fyrd.'

Because there was a kingdom to save.

Priests were summoned to Harald's hall and the priests wrote the summons for the fyrd. Most thegns could not read, and many of their priests would probably struggle to decipher the few words, but the messengers would tell them what the parchments said. They were to arm their men and bring them to Ocmundtun, and the wax seal on the summons was the authority for those orders. The seal showed Odda the Elder's badge of a stag.

‘It will take a week,' Harald warned me, 'for most of the fyrd to reach here, and the Ealdorman will try to stop it happening at all.'

'What will he do?'

'Tell the thegns to ignore it, I suppose.'

'And Svein? What will he do?'

'Try to kill us?'

'And he has eight hundred men who can be here tomorrow.' I said.

‘And I have thirty men,' Harald said bleakly.

'But we do have a fortress,' I said, pointing to the limestone ridge with its palisade.

I did not doubt that the Danes would come. By summoning the fyrd we threatened their safety, and Svein was not a man who would take a threat lightly, and so, while the messages were carried north and south, the townsfolk were told to take their valuables up to the fort beside the river. Some men were set to strengthening the palisade, others took livestock up onto the moor so the beasts could not be taken by the Danes, and Steapa went to every nearby settlement and demanded that men of fighting age go to Ocmundtun with any weapon they possessed, so that by that afternoon the fort was manned by over eighty men. Few were warriors, most had no weapons other than an axe, but from the foot of the hill they looked formidable enough. Women carried food and water to the fort, and most of the town reckoned to sleep up there, despite the rain, for fear that the Danes would come in the night.

Odda the Elder refused to go to the fort. He was too sick, he said, and too feeble, and if he was supposed to die then he would die in Harald's hall. Harald and I tried to persuade him, but he would not listen. 'Mildrith can go,' he said.

'No,' she said. She sat by Odda's bed, her hands clutched tight under the sleeves of her grey robe.

She stared at me, challenge in her eyes, daring me to give her an order to abandon Odda and go to the fortress.

'I am sorry,' I said to her.

'Sorry?'

'About our son.'

'You were not a father to him,' she accused me. Her eyes glistened. 'You wanted him to be a Dane!

You wanted him to be a pagan! You didn't even care for his soul!'

'I cared for him,' I said, but she ignored that. I had not sounded convincing, even to myself.

'His soul is safe,' Harald said gently. 'He is in the Lord Jesus' arms. He is happy.'

Mildrith looked at him and I saw how Harald's words had comforted her, though she still began crying. She caressed her wooden cross, then Odda the Elder reached out and patted her arm.

'If the Danes come, lord,' I said to him, 'I shall send men for you.'

I turned then and went from the sickroom. I could not cope with Mildrith crying or with the thought of a dead son. Such things are difficult, much more difficult than making war, and so I buckled on my swords, picked up my shield and put on my splendid wolf-crested helmet so that, when Harald came from Odda's chamber, he checked to see me standing like a warlord by his hearth.

'If we make a big fire at the eastern end of town,' I said, 'we'll see the Danes come. It will give us time to carry Lord Odda to the fort.'

'Yes.' He looked up at the great rafters of his hall, and perhaps he was thinking that he would never see it thus again, for the Danes would come and the hall would burn. He made the sign of the cross.

'Fate is inexorable,' I told him. What else was there to say? The Danes might come, the hall might burn, but they were small things in the balance of a kingdom, and so I went to order the fire that would illuminate the eastern road, but the Danes did not come that night. It rained softly all through the darkness, so that in the morning the folk in the fort were wet, cold and unhappy.

Then, in the dawn, the first men of the fyrd arrived. It might take days for the farther parts of the shire to receive their summons and to arm men and despatch them to Ocmundtun, but the nearer places sent men straight away so that by late morning there were close to three hundred beneath the fort. No more than seventy of those could be called warriors, men who had proper weapons, shields and at least a leather coat. The rest were farm labourers with hoes or sickles or axes.

Harald sent foraging parties to find grain. It was one thing to gather a force, quite another to feed it, and none of us knew how long we would have to keep the men assembled. If the Danes did not come to us, then we would have to go to them and force them from Cridianton, and for that we would need the whole fyrd of Defnascir. Odda the Younger, I thought, would never allow that to happen.

Nor did he. For, as the rain ended and the noontime prayers were said, Odda himself came to Ocmundtun and he did not come alone, but rode with sixty of his warriors in chain mail and as many Danes in their war glory. The sun came out as they appeared from the eastern trees and it shone on mail and on spear points, on bridle chains and stirrup irons, on polished helmets and bright shield bosses. They spread into the pastures on either side of the road and advanced on Ocmundtun in a wide line, and at its centre were two standards. One, the black stag, was the banner of Defnascir, while the other was a Danish triangle and displayed the white horse.

'There'll be no fight,' I told Harald.

'There won't?'

'Not enough of them. Svein can't afford to lose men, so he's come to talk.'

'I don't want to meet them here,' he gestured at the fort. 'We should be in the hall.'

He ordered that the best armed men should go down to the town, and there we filled the muddy street outside the hall as Odda and the Danes came from the cast. The horsemen had to break their line to enter the town, making a column instead, and the column was led by three men. Odda was in the centre and he was flanked by two Danes, one of them Svein of the White Horse.

Svein looked magnificent, a silver-white warrior. He rode a white horse, wore a white woollen cloak, and his mail and boar-snouted helmet had been scrubbed with sand until they glowed silver in the watery sunlight. His shield bore a silvered boss around which a white horse had been painted. The leather of his bridle, saddle and scabbard had been bleached pale. He saw me, but showed no recognition, just looked along the line of men barring the street and seemed to dismiss them as useless. His banner of the white horse was carried by the second horseman who had the same darkened face as his master, a face hammered by sun and snow, ice and wind.

'Harald.' Odda the Younger had ridden ahead of the two Danes. He was sleek as ever, gleaming in mail, and with a black cloak draping his horse's rump. He smiled as though he welcomed the meeting.

‘You have summoned the fyrd. Why?'

'Because the king commanded it,' Harald said.

Odda still smiled. He glanced at me, appeared not to notice I was present, then looked to the hall door where Steapa had just appeared. The big man had been talking with Odda the Elder, and now he stared at Odda the Younger with astonishment.

'Steapa!' Odda the Younger said. 'Loyal Steapa! How good to see you!'

'You too, lord.'

'My faithful Steapa,' Odda said, plainly pleased to be reunited with his erstwhile bodyguard. 'Come here!' he commanded, and Steapa pushed past us and knelt in the mud by Odda's horse and reverently kissed his master's boot.

'Stand,' Odda said, 'stand. With you beside me, Steapa, who can hurt us?'

'No one, lord.'

'No one,' Odda repeated, then smiled at Harald. 'You said the king ordered the fyrd summoned?

There is a king in Wessex?'

'There is a king in Wessex,' Harald said firmly.

'There is a king skulking in the marshes!' Odda said, loudly enough for all Harald's men to hear.

'He is the king of frogs, perhaps? A monarch of eels? What kind of king is that?'

I answered for Harald, only I answered in Danish. 'A king who ordered me to burn Svein's boats.

Which I did. All but one, which I kept and still have.'

Svein took off his boar-snouted helmet and looked at me and again there was no recognition. His gaze was like that of the great serpent of death that lies at the foot of Yggdrasil.

'I burned the White Horse,' I told him, 'and warmed my hands on its flames.' Svein spat for answer.

'And the man beside you,' I spoke to Odda now, using English, 'is the man who burned your church at Cynuit, the man who killed the monks. The man who is cursed in heaven, in hell and in this world, yet now he is your ally?'

'Does that goat-turd speak for you?' Odda demanded of Harald.

'These men speak for me,' Harald said, indicating the warriors behind him.

'But by what right do you raise the fyrd?' Odda asked. 'I am Ealdorman!'

'And who made you Ealdorman?' Harald asked. He paused, but Odda gave no answer. 'The king of frogs?' Harald asked. 'The monarch of eels? If Alfred has no authority then you have lost yours with his.'

Odda was plainly surprised by Harald's defiance, and he was probably irritated by it, but he gave no sign of annoyance. He just went on smiling. 'I do believe,' he said to Harald, 'that you have misunderstood what happens in Defnascir.'

'Then explain to me,' Harald said.

'I shall,' Odda said, 'but we shall talk with ale and food.' He looked up at the sky. The brief sun was gone behind cloud and a chill wind was gusting the thatch of the street. 'And we should talk under a roof,' Odda suggested, 'before it rains again.'

There were matters to be agreed first, though that was done soon enough. The Danish horsemen would withdraw to the eastern end of the town while Harald's men would retreat to the fort. Each side could take ten men into the hall, and all of those men were to leave their weapons heaped in the street where they were to be guarded by six Danes and as many Saxons.

Harald's servants brought ale, bread, and cheese. There was no meat offered, for it was the season of Lent. Benches were placed at either side of the hearth. Svein crossed to our side of the fire as the benches were brought and at long last deigned to recognise me.

'It was really you who burned the ships?' he asked.

'Including yours.'

'The White Horse took a year and a day to build,' he said, 'and she was made of trees from which we'd hung Odin's sacrifices. She was a good ship.'

'She's all ash on the seashore now,' I said.

'Then one day I shall repay you,' he retorted, and though he spoke mildly, there was a world of threat in his voice. 'And you were wrong,' he added.

'Wrong?' I asked. 'Wrong to burn your ships?'

'There was no altar of gold at Cynuit.'

'Where you burned the monks,' I said.

'I burned them alive,' he agreed, 'and warmed my hands on their flames.' He smiled at that memory. 'You could join me again?' he suggested. 'I shall forgive you burning my ship, and you and I can fight side by side once more? I need good men. I pay well.'

'I am sworn to Alfred.'

'Ah,' he nodded. 'So be it. Enemies.' He went back to Odda's benches.

'You would see your father before we talk?' Harald asked Odda, gesturing towards the door at the hall's end.

'I shall see him,' Odda said, 'when our friendship is repaired. And you and I must be friends.' He said the last words loudly and they prompted men to sit on the benches. 'You summoned the fyrd,' he spoke to Harald, 'because Uhtred brought you orders from Alfred?'

'He did.'

'Then you did the right thing,' Odda said, 'and that is to be praised.' Svein, listening to the translation that was provided by one of his own men, stared flatly at us. 'And now you will do the right thing again,' Odda continued, 'and send the fyrd home.'

'The king has ordered otherwise,' Harald said.

'What king?' Odda asked.

'Alfred, who else?'

'But there are other kings in Wessex,' Odda said. 'Guthrum is King of East Anglia, and he is in Wessex, and some say Æthelwold will be crowned king before the summer.'

'Æthelwold?' Harald asked.

'You'd not heard?' Odda asked. 'Wulfhere of Wiltunscir has sided with Guthrum, and both.

Guthrum and Wulfhere have said Æthelwold will be King of Wessex. And why not? Is not Æthelwold the son of our last king? Should he not be king?'

Harald, uncertain, looked at me. He had not heard of Wulfhere's defection, and it was hard news for him. I nodded. 'Wulfhere is with Guthrum,' I said.

'So Æthelwold, son of Æthelred, will he king in Wessex,' Odda said, 'and Æthelwold has thousands of swords at his command. Alfrig of Kent is with the Danes. There are Danes in Lundene, on Sceapig and on the walls of Contwaraburg. All northern Wessex is in Danish hands. There are Danes here, in Defnascir. What, tell me, is Alfred king of?'

'Of Wessex,' I said.

Odda ignored me, looking at Harald.

'Alfred has our oaths,' Harald said stubbornly.

'And I have your oath,' Odda reminded him. He sighed. 'God knows, Harald, no one was more loyal to Alfred than I. Yet he failed us! The Danes came and the Danes are here, and where is Alfred? Hiding!

In a few weeks their armies will march! They will come from Mercia, from Lundene, from Kent! Their fleets will be off our coast. Armies of Danes and fleets of Vikings! What will you do then?'

Harald shifted uneasily. 'What will you do?' he retorted.

Odda gestured at Svein who, the question translated, spoke for the first time. I interpreted for Harald.

‘Wessex is doomed,’ Svein said in his grating voice. ‘By summer it will be swarming with Danes, with men newly come from the north, and the only Saxons who will live will be those men who aid the Danes now. Those who fight against the Danes,’ Svein said, ‘will be dead, and their women will be whores and their children will be slaves and their homes will be lost and their names shall be forgotten like the smoke of an extinguished fire.’

'And Æthelwold will be king?' I asked scornfully. 'You think we will all bow to a whoring drunkard?'

Odda shook his head. 'The Danes are generous,' he said, and he drew back his cloak and I saw that he were six golden arm rings. 'To those who help them,' he said, 'there will be the rewards of land, wealth and honour.'

‘And Æthelwold will be king?' I asked again.

Odda again gestured at Svein. The big Dane seemed bored, but he stirred himself. 'It is right,' he said, 'that Saxons should he ruled by a Saxon. We shall make a king here.'

I scorned that. They had made Saxon kings in Northumbria and in Mercia and those kings were feeble, leashed to the Danes, and then I understood what Svein meant and I laughed aloud. 'He's promised you the throne!' I accused Odda.

'I've heard more sense from a pig's fart,' Odda retorted, but I knew I was right Æthelwold was Guthrum's candidate for the throne of Wessex, but Svein was no friend of Guthrum and would want his own Saxon as king. Odda.

'King Odda,' I said jeeringly, then spat into the fire.

Odda Would have killed me for that, but we met under the terms of a truce and so he forced himself to ignore the insult. He looked at Harald.

'You have a choice, Harald,' he said, 'you can die or you can live.'

Harald was silent. He had not known about Wulfhere, and the news had appalled him. Wulfhere was the most powerful Ealdorman in Wessex, and if he thought Alfred was doomed, then what was Harald to think? I could see the shire-reeve's uncertainty. His decency wanted him to declare loyalty to Alfred, but Odda had suggested that nothing but death would follow such a choice.

'I ...' Harald began, then fell silent, unable to say what he thought for he did not know his own mind.

'The fyrd is raised,' I spoke, for him, 'at the king's orders, and the king's orders are to drive the Danes from Defnascir.'

Odda spat into the fire for answer.

'Svein has been defeated,' I said. 'His ships are burned. He is like a whipped dog and you give him comfort.' Svein, when that was translated, gave me a look like the stroke of a whip. 'Svein,' I went on as though he was not present, 'must be driven back to the sea.

You have no authority here,' Odda said.

'I have Alfred's authority,' I said, 'and a written order telling you to drive Svein from your shire.'

'Alfred's orders mean nothing,' Odda said, 'and you croak like a swamp frog.' He turned to Steapa.

'You have unfinished business with Uhtred.'

Steapa looked uncertain for a heartbeat, then understood what his master meant. 'Yes, lord,' he said.

'Then finish it now.'

'Finish what now?' Harald asked.

'Your king,' Odda said the last word sarcastically, 'ordered Steapa and Uhtred to fight to the death.

Yet both live! So your king's orders have not been obeyed.'

'There is a truce!' Harald protested.

'Either Uhtred stops interfering in the affairs of Defnascir,' Odda said forcefully, 'or I shall have Defnascir kill Uhtred. You want to know who is right? Alfred or me? You want to know who will be king in Wessex, Æthelwold or Alfred? Then put it to the test, Harald. Let Steapa and Uhtred finish their fight and see which man God favours. If Uhtred wins then I shall support you, and if he loses …' He smiled. He had no doubt who would win.

Harald stayed silent. I looked at Steapa and, as on the first time I met him, saw nothing on his face.

He had promised to protect me, but that was before he had been reunited with his master. The Danes looked happy. Why should they mind two Saxons fighting? Harald, though, still hesitated, and then the weary, feeble voice sounded from the doorway at the back of the hall.

'Let them fight, Harald, let them fight.' Odda the Elder, swathed in a wolf-skin blanket, stood at the door. He held a crucifix. 'Let them fight,' he said again, 'and God will guide the victor's arm.'

Harald looked at me. I nodded. I did not want to fight, but a man cannot back down from combat.

What was I to do? Say that to expect God to indicate a course of action through a duel was nonsense?

To appeal to Harald? To claim that everything Odda had said was wrong and that Alfred would win? If I had refused to fight I was granting the argument to Odda, and in truth he had half convinced me that Alfred was doomed, and Harald, I am sure, was wholly convinced. Yet there was more than mere pride making me fight in the hall that day. There was a belief, deep in my soul, that somehow Alfred would survive. I did not like him, I did not like his god, but I believed fate was on his side.

So I nodded again, this time to Steapa. 'I do not want to fight you,' I said to him, 'but I have given an oath to Alfred, and my sword says lie will win and that Danish blood will dung our fields.'

Steapa said nothing. He just flexed his huge arms, then waited as one of Odda's men went outside and returned with two swords. No shields, just swords. He had taken a pair of blades at random from the pile and he offered them to Steapa first who shook his head, indicating that I should have the choice. I closed my eyes, groped, and took the first hilt that I touched. It was a heavy sword, weighted towards its tip. A slashing weapon, not a piercing blade, and I knew I had chosen wrong. Steapa took the other and scythed it through the air so that the blade sang.

Svein, who had betrayed little emotion so far, looked impressed, while Odda the Younger smiled.

'You can put the sword down,' he told me, 'and thus yield the argument to me.'

Instead I walked to the clear space beside the hearth. I had no intention of attacking Steapa, but would let him come to me. I felt weary and resigned. Fate is inexorable.

'For my sake,' Odda the Elder spoke behind me, 'make it fast.'

'Yes, lord,' Steapa said, and he took a step towards me and then turned as fast as a striking snake and his blade whipped in a slash that took Odda the Younger's throat. The sword was not as sharp as it could have been, so that the blow drove Odda down, but it also ripped his gullet open so that blood spurted a blade's length into the air, then splashed into the fire where it hissed and bubbled.

Odda was on the floor-rushes now, his legs twitching, his hands clutching at his throat that still pumped blood. He made a gargling noise, turned on his back and went into a spasm so that his heels drummed against the floor and then, just as Steapa stepped forward to finish him, he gave a last jerk and was dead.

Steapa drove the sword into the floor, leaving it quivering there.

'Alfred rescued me,' he announced to the hall. 'Alfred took me from the Danes. Alfred is my king.'

'And he has our oaths,' Odda the Elder added, 'and my son had no business making peace with the pagans.'

The Danes stepped back. Svein glanced at me, for I was still holding a sword, then he looked at the boar spears leaning against the wall, judging whether he could snatch one before I attacked him. I lowered the blade.

'We have a truce,' Harald said loudly.

'We have a truce,' I told Svein in Danish.

Svein spat on the bloody rushes, then he and his standard-bearer took another cautious backwards pace.

'But tomorrow,' Harald said, 'there will be no truce, and we shall come to kill you.'

The Danes rode from Ocmundtun. And next day they also went from Cridianton. They could have stayed if they wished. There were more than enough of them to defend Cridianton and make trouble in the shire, but Svein knew he would be besieged and, man by man, worn down until he had no force at all, and so he went north, going to join Guthrum, and I rode to Oxton. The land had never looked more beautiful, the trees were hazed with green and bullfinches were feasting on the first tight fruit buds, while anemones, stitchwort and white violets glowed in sheltered spots. Lambs ran from the buck hares in the pastures. The sun shimmered on the wide sea-reach of the Uisc and the sky was full of lark song beneath which the foxes took lambs, magpies and jays feasted on other birds' eggs, and ploughmen impaled crows at the edges of the fields to ensure a good harvest.

'There'll be butter soon,' a woman told me. She really wanted to know if I was returning to the estate, but I was not. I was saying farewell. There were slaves living there, doing their jobs, and I assured them Mildrith would appoint a steward sooner or later, then I went to the hall and I dug beside the post and found my hoard untouched. The Danes had not come to Oxton. Wirken, the sly priest of Exanmynster, heard 1 was at the hall and rode a donkey up to the estate. He assured me he had kept a watchful eye on the place, and doubtless he wanted a reward.

'It belongs to Mildrith now,' I told him.

'The Lady Mildrith? She lives?'

'She lives,' I said curtly, 'but her son is dead.'

'God rest his poor soul,' Wirken said, making the sign of the cross. I was eating a scrap of ham and he looked at it hungrily, knowing I broke the rules of Lent. He said nothing, but I knew he was cursing me for a pagan.

'And the Lady Mildrith,' I went on, 'would live a chaste life now. She says she will join the sisters in Cridianton.'

'There are no sisters in Cridianton,' Wirken said. 'They're all dead. The Danes saw to that before they left.'

'Other nuns will settle there,' I said. Not that I cared, for the fate of a small nunnery was none of my business. Oxton was no longer my business. The Danes were my business, and the Danes had gone north and I would follow them.

For that was my life. That spring I was twenty-one years old and for half my life I had been with armies. I was not a farmer. I watched the slaves tearing the couch-grass from the home fields and knew the tasks of farming bored me. I was a warrior, and I had been driven from my home of Bebbanburg to the southern edge of England and I think I knew, as Wirken babbled on about how he had guarded the storehouses through the winter, that I was now going north again. Ever north. Back home.

'You lived off these storehouses all winter,' I accused the priest.

'I watched them all winter, lord.'

'And you got fat as you watched,' I said. I climbed into my saddle. Behind me were two bags, ripe with money, and they stayed there as I rode to Exanceaster and found Steapa in The Swan. Next morning, with six other warriors from Ealdorman Odda's guard, we rode north. Our way was marked by pillars of smoke, for Svein was burning and plundering as he went, but we had done what Alfred had wanted us to do. We had driven Svein back to Guthrum, so that now the two largest Danish armies were united. If Alfred had been stronger he might have left them separate and marched against each in turn, but Alfred knew he had only one chance to take back his kingdom, and that was to win one battle. He had to overwhelm all the Danes and destroy them in one blow, and his weapon was an army that existed only in his head. He had sent demands that the fyrd of Wessex would be summoned after Easter and before Pentecost, but no one knew whether it would actually appear. Perhaps we would ride from the swamp and find no one at the meeting place. Or perhaps the fyrd would come, and there would be too few men. The truth was that Alfred was too weak to fight, but to wait longer would only make him weaker. So he had to-fight or lose his kingdom. So we would fight.

Elev

e en

e

'You will have many sons,' Iseult told me. It was dark, though a half-moon was hazed by a mist.

Somewhere to the north-east a dozen fires burned in the hills, evidence that a strong Danish patrol was watching the swamp. 'But I am sorry about Uhtred,' she said.

I wept for him then. I do not know why the tears had taken so long to come, but suddenly I was overwhelmed by the thought of his helplessness, his sudden smile and the pity of it all. Both my half-brothers and my half-sister had died when they were babies and I do not remember my father crying, though perhaps he did. I do remember-my stepmother shrieking in grief, and how my father, disgusted by the sound, had gone hunting with his hawks and hounds.

'I saw three kingfishers yesterday,' Iseult said.

Tears were running down my cheeks, blurring the misted moon. I said nothing.

'Hild says the blue of the kingfisher's feathers is for the virgin and the red is for Christ's blood.'

'And what do you say?'

'That your son's death is my doing.'

'Wyrd bib ful araed,' I said. Fate is fate. It cannot be changed or cheated. Alfred had insisted I marry Mildrith so I would be tied to Wessex and would put roots deep into its rich soil, but I already had roots in Northumbria, roots twisted into the rock of Bebbanburg, and perhaps my son's death was a sign from the gods that I could not make a new home. Fate wanted me to go to my northern stronghold and until I reached Bebbanburg I would be a wanderer.

Men fear wanderers for they have no rules. The Danes came as strangers, rootless and violent, and that, I thought, was why I was always happier in their company. Alfred could spend hours worrying about the righteousness of a law, whether it concerned the fate of orphans or the sanctity of boundary markers, and he was right to worry because folk cannot live together without law, or else every straying cow would lead to bloodshed, but the Danes hacked through the law with swords. It was easier that way, though once they had settled a land they started to make their own laws.

'It was not your fault,' I said. You don't command fate.'

'Hild says there is no such thing as fate,' Iseult said.

'Then Hild is wrong.'

'There is only the will of God,' Iseult said, 'and if we obey that we go to heaven.'

'And if we choose not to,' I said, 'isn't that fate?'

'That's the devil,' she said. 'We are sheep, Uhtred, and we choose our shepherd, a good one or a bad one.'

I thought Hild must have soured Iseult with Christianity, but I was wrong. It was a priest who had come to Æthelingaeg while I had been in Defnascir who had filled her head with his religion. He was a British priest from Dyfed, a priest who spoke Iseult's native tongue and also knew both English and Danish. I was ready to hate him as I hated Brother Asser, but Father Pyrlig stumbled into our hut next morning booming that he had found five goose eggs and was dying of hunger.

'Dying! That's what I am, dying of starvation!' He looked pleased to see me. 'You're the famous Uhtred, eh? And Iseult tells me you hate Brother Asser? Then you're a friend of mine. Why Abraham doesn't take Asser to his bosom I do not know, except maybe Abraham doesn't want the little bastard clinging to his bosom. I wouldn't. It would be like suckling a serpent, it would. Did I say I was hungry.'

He was twice my age and a big man, big-bellied and bighearted. His hair stuck out in ungovernable clumps, he had a broken nose, only four teeth, and a broad smile.

'When I was a child,' he told me, 'ever such a little child, I used to eat mud. Can you believe that?

Do Saxons eat mud? Of course they do, and I thought I don't want to eat mud. Mud is for toads, it is.

So eventually I became a priest. And you know why? Because I never saw a hungry priest! Never! Did you ever see a hungry priest? Nor me!'

All this tumbled out without any introduction, then he spoke earnestly to Iseult in her own tongue and I was sure he was pouring Christianity into her, but then he translated for me.

'I'm telling her that you can make a marvellous dish with goose eggs. Break them up, stir them well and add just a little crumbled cheese. So Defnascir is safe?'

'Unless the Danes send a fleet,' I said.

'Guthrum has that in mind,' Pyrlig said. 'He wants the Danes in Lundene to send their ships to the south coast.'

'You know that?'

'I do indeed, I do indeed! He told me! I've just spent ten days in Cippanhamm. I speak Danish, see, because I'm clever, and so I was an ambassador for my king. How about that! Me, who used to eat mud, an ambassador! Crumble the cheese finer, my love. That's right. I had to discover, you see, how much money Guthrum would pap us to bring our spearmen over the hills and start skewering Saxons.

Now that's a fine ambition for a Briton, skewering Saxons, but the Danes are pagans, and God knows we can't have pagans loose in the world.'

'Why not?'

'It's just a fancy of mine,' he said, 'just a fancy.' He stabbed his finger into a tiny pot of butter, then licked it. 'It isn't really sour,' he told Iseult, 'not very, so stir it in.' He grinned at me. 'What happens when you put two bulls to a herd of cows?'

'One bull dies.'

'There you are! Gods are the same, which is why we don't want pagans here. We're cows and the gods are bulls.'

'So we get humped?'

He laughed. 'Theology's difficult. Anyway, God is my bull so here I am, telling the Saxons about Guthrum.'

'Did Guthrum offer you money?' I asked.

'He offered me the kingdoms of the world! He offered me gold, silver, amber and jet! He even offered me women, or boys if I had that taste, which I don't. And I didn't believe a single promise he made. Not that it mattered. The Britons aren't going to fight anyway. God doesn't want us to. No! My embassy was all a pretence. Brother Asser sent me. He wanted me to spy on the Danes, see? Then tell Alfred what I saw, so that's what I'm doing.'

'Asser sent you?'

'He wants Alfred to win. Not because he loves the Saxons, even Brother Asser isn't that curdled, but because he loves God.'

'And will Alfred win?'

'If God has anything to do with it, yes,' Pyrlig said cheerfully, then gave a shrug.

'But the Danes are strong in men. A big army! But they're not happy, I can tell you that. And they're all hungry. Not starving, mind you, but pulling their belts tighter than they'd like, and now Svein's there so there'll be even less food. Their own fault, of course. Too many men in Cippanhamm!

And too many slaves! They have scores of slaves. But he's sending the slaves to Lundene, to sell them there. They need some baby eels, eh? That'll fatten them up.'

The elvers were swarming into the Saefern Sea and slithering up the shallow waterways of the swamp where they were being netted in abundance. There was no hunger in Æthelingaeg, not if you gorged on elvers.

'I caught three basketfuls yesterday,' Pyrlig said happily, 'and a frog. It had a face just like Brother Asser so I gave it a blessing and threw it back. Don't just stir the eggs, girl! Beat them! I hear your son died?'

'Yes,' I answered stiffly.

'I am sorry,' he said with genuine feeling, 'I am truly sorry, for to lose a child is a desperate hard thing. I sometimes think God must like children. He takes so many to him. I believe there's a garden in heaven, a green garden where children play all the time. He's got two sons of mine up there, and I tell you, the youngest must be making the angels scream. He'll he pulling the girls' hair and beating up the other boys like they were goose eggs.'

'You lost two sons?'

'But I kept three others and four daughters. Why do you think I'm never home?' He grinned at me.

'Noisy little things they are, children, and such appetites! Sweet Jesus, they'd eat a horse a day if they could! There are some folk who say priests shouldn't marry and there are times I think they're right. Do you have any bread, Iseult pointed to a net hanging from the roof. 'Cut the mould off,' she told me.

'I like to see a man obeying a woman,' Father Pyrlig said as I fetched the loaf.

'Why's that?' I asked.

'Because it means I'm not alone in this sorry world. Good God, but that Ælswith was weaned on gall juice, wasn't she? Got a tongue in her like a starving weasel! Poor Alfred.'

'He's happy enough.'

'Good God, man, that's the last thing he is! Some folk catch God like a disease, and he's one of them. He's like a cow after winter, he is.'

'He is?'

'You know when the late spring grass comes in? All green and new and rich? And you put the poor cow out to eat and she blows up like a bladder? She's nothing but shit and wind and then she gets the staggers and drops down dead if you don't take her off the grass for a while. That's Alfred. He got too much of the good green grass of God, and now he's sick on it. But he's a good man, a good man. Too thin, he is, but good. A living saint, no less. Ah, good girl, let's eat.' He scooped some of the eggs with his fingers, then passed the pot to me. 'Thank God it's Easter next week,' he said with his mouth full so that scraps of egg lodged in his huge beard, 'and then we can eat meat again. I'm wasting away without meat. You know Iseult will be baptised at Easter?'

'She told me,' I said shortly.

'And you don't approve? Just think of it as a good wash, then maybe you won't mind so much.'

I was not in Æthelingaeg for Iseult's baptism, nor did I wish to be, for I knew Easter with Alfred would be nothing but prayers and psalms and priests and sermons. Instead I took Steapa and fifty men up into the hills, going towards Cippanhamm, for Alfred had ordered that the Danes were to be harried mercilessly in the next few weeks. He had decided to assemble the fyrd of Wessex close to Ascension Day, which was just six weeks away, and those were the weeks in which Guthrum would be hoping to revive his hungry horses on the spring grass, and so we rode to ambush Danish forage parties. Kill one forage party and the next must be protected by a hundred extra horsemen, and that wearies the horses even more and so requires still more forage. It worked for a while, but then Guthrum began sending his foragers north into Mercia where they were not opposed.

It was a time of waiting. There were two smiths in Æthelingaeg now and, though neither had all the equipment they wanted, and though fuel for their furnaces was scarce, they were making good spear points. One of my jobs was to take men to cut ash poles for the spear shafts.

Alfred was writing letters, trying to discover how many men the shires could bring to battle, and he sent priests to Frankia to persuade the thegns who had fled there to return. More spies came from Cippanhamm confirming that Svein had joined Guthrum, and that Guthrum was strengthening his horses and raising men from the Danish parts of England. He was ordering his West Saxon allies like Wulfhere to arm their men, and warning his garrisons in Wintanceaster, Readingum and Badum that they must be ready to abandon their ramparts and march to his aid. Guthrum had his own spies and must have known Alfred was planning to assemble an army, and I dare say he welcomed that news for such an army would be Alfred's last hope and, should Guthrum destroy the fyrd, Wessex would fall never to rise again.

Æthelingaeg seethed with rumour. Guthrum, it was said, had five thousand men. Ships had come from Denmark and a new army of Norsemen had sailed from Ireland. The Britons were marching. The fyrd of Mercia was on Guthrum's side, and it was said the Danes had set up a great camp at Cracgelad on the River Temes where thousands of Mercian troops, both Danish and Saxon, were assembling. The tumours of Guthrum's strength crossed the sea and Wilfrith of Hamptonscir wrote from Frankia begging Alfred to flee Wessex.

'Take ship to this coast,' he wrote, 'and save your family.'

Leofric rarely rode on patrols with us, but stayed in Æthelingaeg for he had been named commander of the king's bodyguard. He was proud of that, as he should have been, for he had been peasant-born and he could neither read nor write, and Alfred usually insisted that his commanders were literate. Eanflaed's influence was behind the appointment, for she had become a confidante of Ælswith. Alfred's wife went nowhere without Eanflaed, even in church the one-time whore sat just behind Ælswith, and when Alfred held court, Eanflaed was always there.

'The queen doesn't like you,' Eanflaed told me one rare day when I found her alone.

'She's not a queen,' I said. 'Wessex doesn't have queens.'

'She should he a queen,' she said resentfully, 'it would be right and proper.' She was carrying a heap of plants and I noticed her forearms were a pale green. 'Dyeing,' she explained brusquely, and I followed her to where a great cauldron was bubbling on a fire. She threw in the plants and began stirring the mess in the pot. 'We're making green linen,' she said.

'Green linen?'

'Alfred must have a banner,' she said indignantly. 'He can't fight without a banner.' The women were making two banners. One was the great green dragon flag of Wessex, while the other bore the cross of Christianity.

'Your Iseult's working on the cross,' Eanflaed told me.

'I know.'

'You should have been at her baptism.'

'I was killing Danes.'

'But I'm glad she's baptised. Come to her senses, she has.'

In truth, I thought, Iseult had been battered into Christianity. For weeks she had endured the rancour of Alfred's churchmen, had been accused of witchcraft and of being the devil's instrument, and it had worn her down. Then came Hild with her gentler Christianity, and Pyrlig who spoke of God in Iseult's tongue, and Iseult had been persuaded. That meant I was the only pagan left in the swamp and Eanflaed glanced pointedly at my hammer amulet. She said nothing of it, instead asking me whether I truly believed we could defeat the Danes.

'Yes,' I said confidently, though of course I did not know.

'How many men will Guthrum have?'

I knew the questions were not Eanflaed's, but Ælswith's. Alfred's wife wanted to know if her husband had any chance of survival or whether they should take the ship we had captured from Svein and sail to Frankia.

'Guthrum will lead four thousand men,' I said, 'at least.'

'At least?'

'Depends how many come from Mercia,' I said, then thought for a heartbeat, 'but I expect four thousand.'

'And Wessex?'

'The same,' I said. I was lying. With enormous luck we could assemble three thousand, but I doubted it. Two thousand? Not likely, but possible. My real fear was that Alfred would raise his banner and no one would come, or that only a few hundred men would arrive. We could lead three hundred from Æthelingaeg, but what could three hundred do against Guthrum's great army?

Alfred also worried about numbers, and he sent me to Hamptonscir to discover how much of the shire was occupied by the Danes. I found them well entrenched in the north, but the south of the shire was free of them and in Hamtun, where Alfred's fleet was based, the warships were still drawn up on the beach. Burgweard, the fleet's commander, had over a hundred men in the town, all that was left of his crews, and he had them manning the palisade. He claimed he could not leave Hamtun for fear that the Danes would attack and capture the ships, but I had Alfred's scrap of parchment with his dragon seal on it, and I used it to order him to keep thirty men to protect the ships and bring the rest to Alfred.

'When?' he asked gloomily.

'When you're summoned,' I said, 'but it will be soon. And you're to raise the local fyrd too. Bring them.'

'And if the Danes come here?' he asked, 'if they come by sea?'

'Then we lose the fleet,' I said, 'and we build another.'

His fear was real enough. Danish ships were off the south coast again. For the moment, rather than attempt an invasion, they were being Vikings. They landed, raided, raped, burned, stole and went to sea again, but they were numerous enough for Alfred to worry that a whole army might land somewhere on the coast and march against him. We were harassed by that fear and by the knowledge that we were few and the enemy numerous, and that the enemy's horses were fattening on the new grass.

'Ascension Day,' Alfred announced on the day I returned from Hamtun.

That was the day we should be ready in Æthelingaeg, and on the Sunday after, which was the Feast of Saint Monica, we would gather the fyrd, if there was a fyrd. Reports said the Danes were readying to march and it was plain they would launch their attack south towards Wintanceaster, the town that was the capital of Wessex, and to protect it, to bar Guthrum's road south, the fyrd would gather at Egbert's Stone. I had never heard of the place, but Leofric assured me it was an important spot, the place where King Egbert, Alfred's grandfather, had given judgements.

'It isn't one stone,' he said, 'but three.'

'Three?'

'Two big pillars and another boulder on top. The giants made it in the old days.'

And so the summons was issued. Bring every man, the parchments instructed, bring every weapon and say your prayers, for what is left of Wessex will meet at Egbert's Stone to carry battle to the Danes, and no sooner was the summons sent than disaster struck. It came just a week before the fyrd was to gather.

Huppa, Ealdorman of Thornsaeta, wrote that forty Danish ships were off his coast, and that he dared not lead the fyrd away from their threat. Worse, because the Danes were so numerous, he had begged Harald of Defnascir to lend him men.

That letter almost destroyed Alfred's spirits. He had clung to his dream of surprising Guthrum by raising an unexpectedly powerful army, but all his hopes were now shredding away. He had always been thin, but suddenly he looked haggard and he spent hours in the church, wrestling with God, unable to understand why the Almighty had so suddenly turned against him. And two days after the news of the Danish fleet, Svein of the White Horse led three hundred mounted men in a raid against the hills on the edge of the swamp and, because scores of men from the Sumorsaete fyrd had gathered in Æthelingaeg, Svein discovered and stole their horses. We had neither the room nor the forage to keep many horses in Æthelingaeg itself, and so they were pastured beyond the causeway, and I watched from the fort as Svein, riding a white horse and wearing his white-plumed helmet and white cloak, rounded up the beasts and drove them away. There was nothing I could do to stop him. I had twenty men in the fort and Svein was leading hundreds.

'Why were the horses not guarded?' Alfred wanted to know.

'They were,' Wiglaf, Ealdorman of Sumorsaete, said, 'and the guards died.' He saw Alfred's anger, but not his despair. 'We haven't seen a Dane here for weeks!' he pleaded, 'how were we to know they'd come in force?'

'How many men died?'

'Only twelve.'

'Only?' Alfred asked, wincing, 'and how many horses lost?'

'Sixty-three.'

On the night before Ascension Day Alfred walked beside the river. Beocca, faithful as a hound, followed him at a distance, wanting to offer the king God's reassurance, but instead Alfred called to me.

There was a moon, and its light shadowed his cheeks and made his pale eyes look almost white.

'How many men will we have?' he asked abruptly.

I did not need to think about the answer. 'Two thousand.'

He nodded. He knew that number as well as I did.

'Maybe a few more,' I suggested.

He grunted at that. We would lead three hundred and fifty men from Æthelingaeg and Wiglaf, Ealdorman of Sumorsaete, had promised a thousand, though in truth I doubted if that many would come. The fyrd of Wiltunscir had been weakened by Wulfhere's defection, but the southern part of the shire should yield five hundred men, and we could expect some from Hamptonscir, but beyond that we would depend on whatever few men made it past the Danish garrisons that now ringed the heartland of Wessex. If Defnascir and Thornsaeta had sent their fyrds then we would have numbered closer to four thousand, but they were not coming.

'And Guthrum?' Alfred asked, 'how many will he have?’

'Four thousand.'

'More like five,' Alfred said. He stared at the river that was running low between the muddy banks.

The water rippled about the wicker fish traps. 'So should we fight?'

‘What choice do we have?'

He smiled at that. 'We have a choice, Uhtred,' he assured me. 'We can run away. We can go to Frankia. I could become a king in exile and pray that God brings me back.'

‘You think God will?'

‘No,' he admitted. If he ran away then he knew he would die in exile.

'So we fight,' I said.

'And on my conscience,' he said, 'I will for ever bear the weight of all those men who died in a hopeless cause. Two thousand against five thousand? How can 1 justify leading so few against so many?'

'You know how.'

'So I can be king?'

'So that we are not slaves in our own land,' I said.

He pondered that for a while. An owl flew low overhead, a sudden surprise of white feathers and the rush of air across stubby wings. It was an omen, I knew, but of what kind?

'Perhaps we are being punished,' Alfred said.

'For what?'

'For taking the land from the Britons?'

That seemed nonsense to me. If Alfred's god wanted to punish him for his ancestors having taken the land from the Britons, then why send the Danes? Why not send the Britons? God could resurrect Arthur and let his people have their revenge, but why send a new people to take the land?

'Do you want Wessex or not?' I asked harshly.

He said nothing for a while, then gave a sad smile. 'In my conscience,' he said, 'I can find no hope for this fight, but as a Christian I must believe we can win it. God will not let us lose.'

'Nor will this,' I said, and I slapped Serpent-Breath's hilt.

'So simple?' he asked.

'Life is simple,' I said. 'Ale, women, sword and reputation. Nothing else matters.'

He shook his head and I knew he was thinking about God and prayer and duty, but he did not argue.

'So if you were I, Uhtred,' he said, 'would you march?'

'You've already made up your mind, lord,' I said, 'so why ask me?'

He nodded. A dog barked in the village and he turned to stare at the cottages and the hall and the church he had made with its tall alder cross.

'Tomorrow,' he said, you will take a hundred horsemen and patrol ahead of the army.'

'Yes, lord.'

'And when we meet the enemy,' he went on, still staring at the cross, 'you will choose fifty or sixty men from the bodyguard. The best you can find. And you will guard my banners.'

He did not say more, but nor did he need to. What he meant was that I was to take the best warriors, the most savage men, the dangerous warriors who loved battle, and I was to lead them in the place where the fight would be hardest, for an enemy loves to capture his foe's banners. It was an honour to be asked and, if the battle was lost, an almost certain death sentence.

'I shall do it gladly, lord,' I said, 'but ask a favour of you in return.'

'If I can,' he said guardedly.

'If you can,' I said, 'don't bury me. Burn my body on a pyre, and put a sword in my hand.'

He hesitated, then nodded, knowing he had agreed to a pagan funeral. 'I never told you,' he said,

'that I am sorry about your son.'

'So am I, lord.'

'But he is with God, Uhtred, he is assuredly with God.'

'So I'm told, lord, so I'm told.'

And next day we marched. Fate is inexorable, and though numbers and reason told us we could not win, we dared not lose and so we marched to Egbert's Stone.

We marched with ceremony. Twenty-three priests and eighteen monks formed our vanguard and chanted a psalm as they led Alfred's forces away from the fort guarding the southern trackway and east towards the heartland of Wessex.

They chanted in Latin so the words meant nothing to me, but Father Pyrlig had been given use of one of Alfred's horses and, dressed in a leather coat and with a great sword strapped to his side and with a stout-shafted hoar spear on one shoulder, he rode alongside me and translated the words.

"'God,"' he said, '"you have abandoned me, you have scattered us, you are angry with us, now turn to us again." That sounds a reasonable request, doesn't it? You've kicked us in the face, so now give us a cuddle, eh?'

'It really means that?'

'Not the bit about kicks and cuddles. That was me.' He grinned at me. 'I do miss war. Isn't that a sin?'

'You've seen war?'

'Seen it? I was a warrior before I joined the church! Pyrlig the Fearless, they called me. I killed four Saxons in a day once. All by myself and I had nothing but a spear. And they had swords and shields, they did. Back home they made a song about me, but mind you, the Britons will sing about anything. I can sing you the song, if you like? It tells how I slaughtered three hundred and ninety-four Saxons in one day, but it's not entirely accurate.'

'So how many did you kill?'

'I told you. Four.' He laughed.

'So how did you learn English?'

'My mother was a Saxon, poor thing. She was taken in a raid on Mercia and became a slave.'

'So why did you stop being a warrior?'

'Because I found God, Uhtred. Or God found me. And I was becoming too proud. Songs about yourself go to your head and I was wickedly proud of myself, and pride is a terrible thing.'

'It's a warrior's weapon,' I said.

'It is indeed,' he agreed, 'and that is why it is a terrible thing, and why I pray God purges me of it.'

We were well ahead of the priests now, climbing towards the nearest hilltop to look north and east for the enemy, but the churchmen's voices followed us, their chant strong in the morning air.

'"Through God we shall do bravely,"' Father Pyrlig interpreted for me, '"and God shall trample down our enemies". Now there's a blessed thought for a fine morning, Lord Uhtred!'

'The Danes are saying their own prayers, father.'

'But to what god, eh? No point in shouting at a deaf man, is there?' He curbed his horse at the hilltop and stared northwards. 'Not even a mouse stirring.'

'The Danes are watching,' I said, 'we can't see them, but they can see us.'

If they were watching then what they could see was Alfred's three hundred and fifty men riding or walking away from the swamp, and in the distance another five or six hundred men who were the fyrd from the western part of Sumorsaete who had camped to the south of the swamp and now marched to join our smaller column. Most of the men from Æthelingaeg were real soldiers, trained to stand in the shield wall, but we also had fifty of the marsh men. I had wanted Eofer, the strong bowman, to come with us, but he could not fight without his niece telling him what to do and I had no intention of taking a child to war and so we had left Eofer behind. A good number of women and children were following the column, though Alfred had sent Ælswith and his children south to Scireburnan under a guard of forty men. We could hardly spare those men, but Alfred insisted his family go. Ælswith was to wait in Scireburnan and, if news came that her husband was defeated and the Danes victorious, she was to flee south to the coast and find a ship that would take her to Frankia. She was also instructed to take with her whatever books she could find in Scireburnan, for Alfred reckoned the Danes would burn every book in Wessex and so Æ1swith was to rescue the gospel books and saints' lives and church fathers and histories and philosophers and thus raise her son Edward to become a learned king in exile.