Sword Song (9 page)

“The dead don’t lie,” I blurted out.

“The living do! By God, they do! Even I lie, Lord Uhtred.” He grinned at me mischievously. “I sent a message to my wife and said she’d hate being in East Anglia!” He laughed. Alfred had asked Pyrlig to go to East Anglia because he was a priest and because he spoke Danish, and his task there had been to educate Guthrum in Christian ways. “In fact she’d love it there!” Pyrlig went on. “It’s warmer than home and there are no hills to speak of. Flat and wet, that’s East Anglia, and without a proper hill anywhere! And my wife’s never been fond of hills, which is why I probably found God. I used to live on hilltops just to keep away from her, and you’re closer to God on a hilltop. Bjorn isn’t dead.”

He had said the last three words with a sudden brutality, and I answered him just as harshly. “I saw him.”

“You saw a man come from a grave, that’s what you saw.”

“I saw him!” I insisted.

“Of course you did! And you never thought to question what you saw, did you?” The Welshman asked the question harshly. “Bjorn had been put in that grave just before you came! They piled earth on him and he breathed through a reed.”

I remembered Bjorn spitting something out of his mouth as he staggered upright. Not the harp string, but something else. I had thought it a lump of earth, but in truth it had been paler. I had not thought about it at the time, but now I understood that the resurrection had all been a trick and I sat on the foredeck of the
Swan
and felt the last remnants of my dream crumbling. I would not be king. “How do you know all this?” I asked bitterly.

“King Æthelstan’s no fool. He has his spies.” Pyrlig put a hand on my arm. “Was he very convincing?”

“Very,” I said, still bitter.

“He’s one of Haesten’s men, and if we ever catch him he’ll go properly to hell. So what did he tell you?”

“That I would be king in Mercia,” I said softly. I was to be king of Saxon and Dane, enemy of the Welsh, king between the rivers and lord of all I ruled. “I believed him,” I said ruefully.

“But how could you be King of Mercia?” Pyrlig asked, “unless Alfred made you king?”

“Alfred?”

“You gave him your oath, did you not?”

I was ashamed to tell the truth, but had no choice. “Yes,” I admitted.

“Which is why I must tell him,” Pyrlig said sternly, “because a man breaking an oath is a serious matter, Lord Uhtred.”

“It is,” I agreed.

“And Alfred will have the right to kill you when I tell him.”

I shrugged.

“Better you keep the oath,” Pyrlig said, “than be fooled by men who make a corpse from a living man. The Fates are not on your side, Lord Uhtred. Trust me.”

I looked at him and saw the sorrow in his eyes. He liked me, yet he was telling me I had been fooled, and he was right, and the dream was collapsing around me. “What choice do I have?” I asked him bitterly. “You know I went to Lundene to join them, and you must tell Alfred that, and he will never trust me again.”

“I doubt he trusts you now,” Pyrlig said cheerfully. “He’s a wise man, Alfred. But he knows you, Uhtred, he knows you are a warrior, and he needs warriors.” He paused to pull out the wooden cross that hung about his neck. “Swear on it,” he said.

“Swear what?”

“That you will keep your oath to him! Do that and I will keep silent. Do that and I will deny what happened. Do that and I will protect you.”

I hesitated.

“If you break your oath to Alfred,” Pyrlig said, “then you are my enemy and I’ll be forced to kill you.”

“You think you could?” I asked.

He grinned his mischievous grin. “Ah, you like me, lord, even though I am a Welshman and a priest, and you’d be reluctant to kill me, and I’d have three strokes before you woke up to your danger, so yes, lord, I would kill you.”

I put my right hand on the cross. “I swear it,” I said.

And I was still Alfred’s man.

W
e reached Coccham that evening and I watched Gisela, who had as little love for Christianity as I did, warm to Father Pyrlig. He flirted with her outrageously, complimented her extravagantly, and played with our children. We had two then, and we had been lucky, for both babies had lived, as had their mother. Uhtred was the oldest. My son. He was four years old with hair as golden-colored as mine and a strong little face with a pug nose, blue eyes, and a stubborn chin. I loved him then. My daughter Stiorra was two years old. She had a strange name and at first I had not liked it, but Gisela had pleaded with me and I could refuse her almost nothing, and certainly not the naming of a daughter. Stiorra simply meant “star,” and Gisela swore that she and I had met under a lucky star and that our daughter had been born under the same star. I had got used to the name by now and loved it as I loved the child, who had her mother’s dark hair and long face and sudden mischievous smile. “Stiorra, Stiorra!” I would say as I tickled her, or let her play with my arm rings. Stiorra, so beautiful.

I played with her on the night before Gisela and I left for Wintanceaster. It was spring and the Temes had subsided so that the river meadows showed again and the world was hazed with green as the leaves budded. The first lambs wobbled in fields bright with cowslips, and the blackbirds filled the sky with rippling song. Salmon had re
turned to the river and our woven willow traps provided good eating. The pear trees in Coccham were thick with buds, and just as thick with bullfinches, which had to be scared away by small boys so that we would have fruit in the summertime. It was a good time of year, a time when the world stirred, and a time when we had been summoned to Alfred’s capital for the wedding of his daughter, Æthelflaed, to my cousin, Æthelred. And that night, as I pretended my knee was a horse and that Stiorra was the horse’s rider, I thought about my promise to provide Æthelred with his wedding gift. The gift of a city. Lundene.

Gisela was spinning wool. She had shrugged when I had told her she was not to be Queen of Mercia, and she had nodded gravely when I said I would keep my oath with Alfred. She accepted fate more readily than I did. Fate and that fortunate star, she said, had brought us together despite all that the world had done to keep us apart. “If you keep your oath to Alfred,” she said suddenly, interrupting my play with Stiorra, “then you must capture Lundene from Sigefrid?”

“Yes,” I said, marveling as I often did that her thoughts and mine were so often the same.

“Can you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. Sigefrid and Erik were still in the old city, their men guarding the Roman walls that they had repaired with timber. No ship could now come up the Temes without paying the brothers their toll, and that toll was huge, so that the river traffic had stopped, as merchants sought other ways to bring goods to Wessex. King Guthrum of East Anglia had threatened Sigefrid and Erik with war, but his threat had proved empty. Guthrum did not want war, he just wanted to persuade Alfred that he was doing his best to keep the peace treaty, so if Sigefrid was to be removed, then it would be the West Saxons who did the work, and I who would be responsible for leading them.

I had made my plans. I had written to the king and he, in turn, had written to the ealdormen of the shires, and I had been promised four hundred trained warriors along with the fyrd of Berrocscire. The fyrd was an army of farmers, foresters, and laborers, and though it would be
numerous it would also be untrained. The four hundred trained men would be the ones I relied on, and spies said Sigefrid now had at least six hundred in the old city. Those same spies said that Haesten had gone back to his camp at Beamfleot, but that was not far from Lundene and he would hurry to reinforce his allies, as would those Danes of East Anglia who hated Guthrum’s Christianity and wanted Sigefrid and Erik to begin their war of conquest. The enemy, I thought, would number at least a thousand, and all of them would be skilled with sword, ax, or spear. They would be war-Danes. Enemies to fear.

“The king,” Gisela said mildly, “will want to know how you plan to do it.”

“Then I shall tell him,” I said.

She gave me a dubious glance. “You will?”

“Of course,” I said, “he’s the king.”

She laid the distaff on her lap and frowned at me. “You will tell him the truth?”

“Of course not,” I said. “He may be the king, but I’m not a fool.”

She laughed, which made Stiorra echo the laugh. “I wish I could come with you to Lundene,” Gisela said wistfully.

“You can’t,” I said forcefully.

“I know,” she answered with uncharacteristic meekness, then touched a hand to her belly. “I really can’t.”

I stared at her. I stared a long time as her news settled in my mind. I stared, I smiled, and then I laughed. I threw Stiorra high into the air so that her dark hair almost touched the smoke-blackened thatch. “Your mother’s pregnant,” I told the happily squealing child.

“And it’s all your father’s fault,” Gisela added sternly.

We were so happy.

Æthelred was my cousin, the son of my mother’s brother. He was a Mercian, though for years now he had been loyal to Alfred of Wessex, and that day in Wintanceaster, in the great church Alfred had built, Æthelred of Mercia received his reward for that loyalty.

He was given Æthelflaed, Alfred’s eldest daughter and second child.
She was golden haired and had eyes the color and brightness of a summer’s sky. Æthelflaed was thirteen or fourteen years old then, the proper age for a girl to marry, and she had grown into a tall young woman with an upright stance and a bold look. She was already as tall as the man who was to be her husband.

Æthelred is a hero now. I hear tales of him, tales told by firelight in Saxon halls the length of England. Æthelred the Bold, Æthelred the Warrior, Æthelred the Loyal. I smile when I hear the stories, but I do not say anything, not even when men ask if it is true that I once knew Æthelred. Of course I knew Æthelred, and it is true that he was a warrior before sickness slowed and stilled him, and he was also bold, though his shrewdest stroke was to pay poets to be his courtiers so that they would make up songs about his prowess. A man could become rich in Æthelred’s court by stringing words like beads.

He was never King of Mercia, though he wanted to be. Alfred made sure of that, for Alfred wanted no king in Mercia. He wanted a loyal follower to be the ruler of Mercia, and he made sure that loyal follower was dependent on West Saxon money, and Æthelred was his chosen man. He was given the title Ealdorman of Mercia, and in all but name he was king, though the Danes of northern Mercia never recognized his authority. They did recognize his power, and that power came from being Alfred’s son-in-law, which was why the Saxon thegns of southern Mercia also accepted him. They may not have liked Ealdorman Æthelred, but they knew he could bring West Saxon troops to confront any southward move by the Danes.

And on a spring day in Wintanceaster, a day bright with birdsong and sunlight, Æthelred came into his power. He strutted into Alfred’s big new church with a smile across his red-bearded face. He ever suffered from the delusion that others liked him and perhaps some men did like him, but not me. My cousin was short, pugnacious, and boastful. His jaw was broad and belligerent, his eyes challenging. He was twice as old as his bride, and for almost five years he had been commander of Alfred’s household troops, an appointment he owed to birth rather than to ability. His good fortune had been to inherit lands
that spread across most of southern Mercia, and that made him Mercia’s foremost nobleman and, I grudgingly supposed, that sad country’s natural leader. He was also, I ungrudgingly supposed, a piece of shit.

Alfred never saw that. He was deceived by Æthelred’s flamboyant piety, and by the fact that Æthelred was always ready to agree with the King of Wessex. Yes, lord, no, lord, let me empty your night soil bucket, lord, and let me lick your royal arse, lord. That was Æthelred, and his reward was Æthelflaed.

She came into the church a few moments after Æthelred and she, like him, was smiling. She was in love with love, transported that day to a height of joy that showed like radiance on her sweet face. She was a lithe young woman who already had a sway in her hips. She was long-legged, slender, and with a snub-nosed face unscarred by disease. She wore a dress of pale blue linen sewn with panels showing saints with halos and crosses. She had a girdle of gold cloth hung with tassels and small silver bells. Over her shoulders was a cape of white linen that was fastened at her throat with a crystal brooch. The cape swept the rushes on the flagstone floor as she walked. Her hair, gold bright, was coiled about her head and held in place with ivory combs. That spring day was the first on which she wore her hair up, a sign of marriage, and it revealed her long thin neck. She was so graceful that day.

She caught my gaze as she walked toward the white-hung altar and her eyes, already filled with delight, seemed to take on a new dazzle. She smiled at me and I had to smile back, and she laughed for joy before walking on toward her father and the man who was to be her husband. “She’s very fond of you,” Gisela said with a smile.

“We have been friends since she was a child,” I said.

“She is still a child,” Gisela said softly as the bride reached the flower-strewn, cross-burdened altar.

I remember thinking that Æthelflaed was being sacrificed on that altar, but if that was true then she was a most willing victim. She had always been a mischievous and willful child, and I did not doubt that she chafed under her sour mother’s eye and her stern father’s rules.
She saw marriage as an escape from Alfred’s dour and pious court, and that day Alfred’s new church was filled with her happiness. I saw Steapa, perhaps the greatest warrior of Wessex, crying. Steapa, like me, was fond of Æthelflaed.

There were close to three hundred folk in the church. Envoys had come from the Frankish kingdoms across the sea, and others had come from Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and the Welsh kingdoms, and those men, all priests or nobles, were given places of honor close to the altar. The ealdormen and high reeves of Wessex were there too, while nearest to the altar was a dark herd of priests and monks. I heard little of the mass, for Gisela and I were in the back of the church where we talked with friends. Once in a while a sharp command for silence would be issued by a priest, but no one took any notice.

Hild, abbess of a nunnery in Wintanceaster, embraced Gisela. Gisela had two good Christian friends. The first was Hild, who had once fled the church to become my lover, and the other was Thyra, Ragnar’s sister, with whom I had grown up and whom I loved as a sister. Thyra was a Dane, of course, and had been raised in the worship of Thor and Odin, but she had converted and come south to Wessex. She dressed like a nun. She wore a drab gray robe with a hood that hid her astonishing beauty. A black girdle encircled her waist, which was normally as thin as Gisela’s, but now was plump with pregnancy. I laid a gentle hand on the girdle. “Another?” I asked.

“And soon,” Thyra said. She had given birth to three children, of whom one, a boy, still lived.

“Your husband is insatiable,” I said with mock sternness.

“It is God’s will,” Thyra said seriously. The humor I remembered from her childhood had evaporated with her conversion, though in truth it had probably left her when she had been enslaved in Dunholm by her brother’s enemies. She had been raped and abused and driven mad by her captors, and Ragnar and I had fought our way into Dunholm to release her, but it was Christianity that had freed her from the madness and made her into the serene woman who now looked at me so gravely.

“And how is your husband?” I asked her.

“Well, thank you,” her face brightened as she spoke. Thyra had found love, not just of God, but of a good man, and for that I was thankful.

“You will, of course, call the child Uhtred if it’s a boy,” I said sternly.

“If the king permits it,” Thyra said, “we shall name him Alfred, and if she’s a girl then she will be called Hild.”

That made Hild cry, and Gisela then revealed that she was also pregnant, and the three women went into an interminable discussion of babies. I extricated myself and found Steapa who was standing head and shoulders above the rest of the congregation. “You know I’m to throw Sigefrid and Erik out of Lundene?” I asked him.

“I was told,” he said in his slow, deliberate way.

“You’ll come?”

He gave a quick smile that I took to be consent. He had a frightening face, his skin stretched tight across his big-boned skull so that he seemed to be perpetually grimacing. In battle he was fearsome, a huge warrior with sword skill and savagery. He had been born to slavery, but his size and his fighting ability had raised him to his present eminence. He served in Alfred’s bodyguard, owned slaves himself, and farmed a wide swath of fine land in Wiltunscir. Men were wary of Steapa because of the anger that was ever-present on his face, but I knew him to be a kind man. He was not clever. Steapa was never a thinker, but he was kind and he was loyal. “I’ll ask the king to release you,” I said.

“He’ll want me to go with Æthelred,” Steapa said.

“You’d rather be with the man who does the fighting, wouldn’t you?” I asked.

Steapa blinked at me, too slow to understand the insult I had offered my cousin. “I shall fight,” he said, then laid a huge arm on the shoulders of his wife, a tiny creature with an anxious face and small eyes. I could never remember her name, so I greeted her politely and pushed on through the crowd.

Æthelwold found me. Alfred’s nephew had begun drinking again
and his eyes were bloodshot. He had been a handsome young man, but his face was thickening now and the veins were red and broken under his skin. He drew me to the edge of the church to stand beneath a banner on which a long exhortation had been embroidered in red wool. “All That You Ask of God,” the banner read, “You Will Receive if You Believe. When Good Prayer Asks, Meek Faith Receives.” I assumed Alfred’s wife and her ladies had done the embroidery, but the sentiments sounded like Alfred’s own. Æthelwold was clutching my elbow so hard that it hurt. “I thought you were on my side,” he hissed reproachfully.