The Burning Land (32 page)

“You think we’re a tavern?” she demanded.

“You won’t leave again, will you?” Stiorra was asking insistently.

“No,” I said, “no, no, no,” and then I stopped talking because Æthelflæd had appeared in a doorway, framed there by the darkness behind and even on that drab gray day it seemed to me that, though she was dressed in a cloak and hood of coarse brown weave, she glowed.

And I remembered Iseult’s prophecy made so many years ago, made when Æthelflæd was no older than Stiorra, a prophecy made when Wessex was at its weakest, when the Danes had overrun the country and Alfred was a fugitive in the marshes. Iseult, that strange and lovely woman, dark as shadows, had promised me that Alfred would give me power and that my woman would be a creature of gold.

And I stared at Æthelflæd and she stared back, and I knew the promise I had made to my daughter was one I would keep. I would not leave.

I put my children down, warning them to stay away from the horses’ hooves, and I walked across the puddled courtyard, oblivious of the nuns who had crept out to watch our arrival. I planned to bow to Æthelflæd. She was, after all, a king’s daughter and the wife of Mercia’s ruler, but her face was at once tearful and happy and I did not bow. I held out my arms and she came to me, and I felt her body trembling as I held her close. Maybe she could feel my heart beating, for it seemed to me as loud as a great drumbeat. “You’ve come,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I knew you would.”

I pushed back her hood to see her hair, as golden as mine. I smiled. “A creature of gold,” I said.

“Foolish man,” she said, smiling.

“What happens now?” I asked her.

“I imagine,” she said, stepping gently away from me and pulling the hood back over her hair, “that my husband will try to kill you.”

“And he can summon?” I asked, then paused to think, “fifteen hundred trained warriors?”

“At least that many.”

“Then I see no difficulty,” I said lightly. “I have at least forty men.”

And that afternoon the first of the Mercian warriors came.

They arrived in groups, ten or twenty at a time, riding from the north and making a loose cordon about the nunnery. I watched them from the bell-tower, counting over a hundred warriors, and still more came. “The thirty men in the village,” I asked Æthelflæd, “they were here to keep you from leaving?”

“They were supposed to stop food reaching the nunnery,” she said, “though they weren’t very effective. Supplies came across the river by boat.”

“They wanted to starve you?”

“My husband thought that would make me leave. Then I’d have to go back to him.”

“Not to your father?”

She grimaced. “He would have sent me back to my husband, wouldn’t he?”

“Would he?”

“Marriage is a sacrament, Uhtred,” she said almost wearily, “it is sanctified by God, and you know my father won’t offend God.”

“So why didn’t Æthelred just drag you back?”

“Invade a nunnery? My father would disapprove of that!”

“He would,” I said, watching a larger group of horsemen appear to the north.

“They thought my father would die at any moment,” she said, and I knew she spoke of my cousin and his friend, Aldhelm, “and they were waiting for that.”

“But your father lives.”

“He recovers,” Æthelflæd said, “God be thanked.”

“And here comes trouble,” I said, because the new band of horsemen, at least fifty in number, rode beneath a banner, suggesting that whoever commanded the troops guarding the nunnery was coming
himself. As the horsemen drew nearer, I saw the banner displayed a cross made of two big-bladed war axes. “Whose badge is that?”

“Aldhelm’s,” Æthelflæd said flatly.

Two hundred men ringed the monastery now, and Aldhelm, riding a tall black stallion, placed himself fifty paces from the nunnery gates. He had a bodyguard of two priests and a dozen warriors. The warriors carried shields that bore their lord’s crossed-ax badge, and those grim men gathered just behind him and, like their lord, gazed in silence at the closed gates. Did Aldhelm know I was inside? He might have suspected, but I doubt he had any certainty. We had ridden fast through Mercia, keeping to the eastern half where the Danes were strongest, so few men in Saxon Mercia would realize I had come south. Yet perhaps Aldhelm suspected I was there, for he made no attempt to enter the nunnery, or else he was under orders not to offend his god by committing sacrilege. Alfred might forgive Æthelred for making Æthelflæd unhappy, but he would never forgive an insult to his god.

I went down to the courtyard. “What’s he waiting for?” Finan asked me.

“Me,” I said.

I dressed for war. I dressed in shining mail, sword-belted, booted, with my wolf-crested helmet and my shield with the wolf badge, and I chose to carry a war ax as well as my two scabbarded swords. I ordered one leaf of the convent gate to be opened, then walked out alone. I did not ride because I had not been able to buy a battle-trained stallion.

I walked in silence and Aldhelm’s men watched me. If Aldhelm had possessed a scrap of courage he should have ridden at me and chopped me down with the long sword hanging at his waist, and even without courage he could have ordered his personal guard to cut me down, but instead he just stared at me.

I stopped a dozen paces from him, then leaned the battle-ax on my shoulder. I had pushed open the hinged cheek-plates of my helmet so Aldhelm’s men could see my face. “Men of Mercia!” I shouted so that not only Aldhelm’s men could hear me, but the
West Saxon troops across the river. “Any day now Jarl Haesten will lead an attack on your country! He comes with thousands of men, hungry men, spear-Danes, sword-Danes, Danes who would rape your wives, enslave your children, and steal your lands. They will make a greater army than the horde of warriors you defeated at Fearnhamme! How many of you were at Fearnhamme?”

Men glanced at each other, but none raised a hand or shouted that they had been present at that great victory.

“You’re ashamed of your triumph?” I asked them. “You made a slaughter that will be remembered so long as men live in Mercia! And you are ashamed of it? How many of you were at Fearnhamme?”

Some found their courage then and lifted their arms, and one man cheered, and suddenly most of them were cheering. They cheered themselves. Aldhelm, confused, raised a hand to call for silence, but they ignored him.

“And who,” I bellowed louder, “do you want to lead you against the Jarl Haesten who comes here with Vikings and pirates, with killers and slavers, with spears and axes, with murder and fire? It was the Lady Æthelflæd who encouraged you to victory at Fearnhamme, and you want her locked in a nunnery? She begged me to come and fight with you again, and here I am, and you greet me with swords? With spears? So who do you want to lead you against Jarl Haesten and his killers?” I let that question hang for a few heartbeats, then I leveled the ax so it pointed at Aldhelm. “Do you want him?” I shouted, “or me?”

What a fool that man was. At that moment, in the remnants of rain that spat out of the west, he should have killed me fast, or else he should have embraced me. He could have leaped from his saddle and offered me friendship, and so pretended an alliance that would buy him the time during which he could arrange my death by stealth, but instead he showed fear. He was a coward, he had always been a coward, brave only when faced by the weak, and the fear was on his face, it was in his hesitation, and it was not till one of his followers leaned and whispered in his ear that he found his voice. “This man,” he called, pointing at me, “is outlawed from Wessex.”

That was news to me, but it was not surprising. I had broken my oath to Alfred, so Alfred would have little choice but to declare me outlaw and thus prey to anyone with the courage to capture me. “So I’m an outlaw!” I shouted, “so come and kill me! And who will protect you from Jarl Haesten then?”

Aldhelm came to his senses then and muttered something to the man who had whispered to him, and that man, a big broad-shouldered warrior, spurred his horse forward. His sword was drawn. He knew what he was doing. He did not ride at me frantically, but deliberately. He came to kill me, and I could see his eyes judging me from deep in the shadow of his helmet. His sword was already drawn back, his arm tensed for the sweeping stroke that would crash into my shield with the weight of man and horse behind the blade to throw me off balance. Then the horse would turn into me and the sword would come again from behind me, and he knew that I knew all that, but he was reassured when I raised my shield, for that meant I would do what he expected me to do. I saw his mouth tighten and his heels nudge back and his stallion, a big gray beast, lunged ahead and the sword flashed in the dull air.

All the man’s great strength was in that stroke. It came from my right. My shield was in my left hand, the ax in my right. I did two things.

I dropped onto one knee and lifted the shield over my head so it was almost flat above my helmet, and at the same moment I lunged the ax into the horse’s legs and let go of the haft.

The sword slammed onto my shield, skidded across the wood, clanged against the boss, and just then the horse, the ax tangled in its rear legs, whinnied and stumbled. I saw blood bright on a fetlock, and I was already standing as the horseman slashed again, but he and his horse were off balance and the stroke screeched harmlessly off the iron rim of my shield. Aldhelm shouted at men to help his champion, but Finan, Sihtric, and Osferth were already out of the convent’s gate, mounted and armed, and Aldhelm’s men hesitated as I took a pace toward the horseman. He slashed again, still hampered by his horse’s skittishness, and this time I let my shield glance the blow downward and simply reached out and grasped the
horseman’s wrist. He shouted in alarm, and I pulled hard. He fell from the saddle, crashed onto the damp street and, for a heartbeat, looked dazed. His stallion, whinnying, twisted away as the man stood. His shield, looped onto his left arm, was streaked with mud.

I had stepped back. I drew Serpent-Breath, the blade hissing in the scabbard’s tight throat. “What’s your name?” I asked. More of my men were coming from the nunnery, though Finan held them back.

The man rushed at me, hoping to throw me off balance with his shield, but I stepped aside and let him go past me. “What’s your name?” I asked again.

“Beornoth,” he told me.

“Were you at Fearnhamme?” I asked, and he gave a curt nod. “I didn’t come here to kill you, Beornoth,” I said.

“I’m sworn to my lord,” he said.

“An unworthy lord,” I told him.

“You should know,” he said, “you breaker of oaths,” and with that he attacked again, and I raised my shield to take the stroke and he dropped his arm fast, taking the sword beneath my shield and the blade slammed into my calf, but I have always worn strips of iron sewn into my boots because the stroke beneath the shield is such a danger. Some men wear leg armor, but that display will deter an enemy from the stroke beneath the shield, while hidden strips of iron make the legs look vulnerable and invite the stroke, which opens the enemy to destruction. My strips stopped Beornoth’s sword dead and he looked surprised as I rammed Serpent-Breath’s hilt to hit him in the face with my gloved fist that was closed about the sword’s handle. He staggered back. My left leg was aching from his blow, but he was bleeding from a broken nose and I slammed the shield into him, forcing him back again, then I bullied him again with the shield and this time he fell backward and I kicked his sword arm aside, put a foot on his belly, and placed Serpent-Breath’s tip at his mouth. He stared up at me with hatred. He was wondering if he had time to sweep the sword up at me, but he knew there was no time left. I had but to move my hand and he would be choking on his own blood.

“Stay still, Beornoth,” I said softly, then looked at Aldhelm’s men.
“I didn’t come here to kill Mercians!” I shouted. “I came here to fight Jarl Haesten!” I stepped away and took my sword from Beornoth’s face. “Get up,” I told him. He stood uncertainly, not sure whether the fight was over or not. The hatred was gone from his eyes, now he was just staring at me with puzzlement. “Go,” I said.

“I am sworn to kill you,” he said.

“Don’t be a fool, Beornoth,” I said wearily, “I just gave you your life. That makes you mine.” I turned my back on him. “The Lord Aldhelm,” I shouted, “sends a brave man to do what he dares not do! Would you be led by a coward?”

There were men here who remembered me, not just from Fearnhamme, but from the attack on Lundene. These were warriors, and all warriors want to be led by a man who brings them success. Aldhelm was no warrior. They knew that, but they were still confused and uncertain. All of these Mercians were sworn to Aldhelm and some had become wealthy from his gifts. Those men kicked their horses close to their lord and I saw their hands reaching for sword hilts.

“At Fearnhamme,” a voice called from behind me, “the Lord Aldhelm wished to run away. Is he the man to protect us?” It was Æthelflæd, mounted on my horse and still wearing her drab convent clothes, though with her bright hair uncovered. “Who was it that led you to the slaughter?” she demanded, “who protected your homes? Who protected your wives and your children? Who would you rather serve?”

Someone from among the Mercian warriors shouted my name, and a cheer followed. Aldhelm had lost and he knew it. He shouted at Beornoth to kill me, but Beornoth stayed still and so Aldhelm, his voice desperate, ordered his supporters to cut me down.

“You don’t want to fight each other!” I shouted, “you’ll have real enemies enough soon!”

“God damn you,” one of Aldhelm’s men snarled. He drew his sword and spurred his horse, and his action broke the uncertainty. More swords were drawn and it was suddenly chaos.

Men made their decisions, either for or against Aldhelm, and the vast majority were against him. They turned on his guards just
as the man attacking me slashed with his sword. I deflected the blow with my shield as the horsemen swirled around me in a clash of blades. Finan took care of my attacker. Osferth, I noted, had put his horse in front of Æthelflæd so he could protect his half-sister, but she was in no danger. It was Aldhelm’s men who were being hacked down, though Aldhelm himself, in pure panic, managed to kick his horse free of the sudden and savage fight. His sword was drawn, but all he wanted was to escape, but there were men all around him and then, seeing me, he realized his advantage, that he was on horseback and I was not, and he drove his spurs back and came to kill me.