The Burning Land (36 page)

The ship was the
Haligast
that had once been the vessel that carried Alfred up and down the Temes, but it seemed his sickness had caused him to abandon such voyages and so the small
Haligast
had been brought through the treacherous gap between the bridge piers
and was now used as a scouting vessel. Her master was Ralla, an old friend. “She’s light-built,” he said of the
Haligast
, “and she’s quick.”

“Faster than
Seolferwulf
?” I asked. He had known my ship well.

“Nowhere close, lord,” he said, “but she runs well on the wind, and if the Danes get too close we can use shallower water.”

“When I was here,” I said in a mild voice, “the Danes would run from us.”

“Things change,” Ralla said gloomily.

“Are the pagans attacking ships?” Æthelflæd asked.

“We haven’t seen a trading ship in two weeks,” Ralla said, “so they must be.”

Æthelflæd had insisted on coming with me. I did not want her company because I have never thought women should be exposed to unnecessary danger, but I had learned not to argue with Alfred’s daughter. She wanted to be a part of the campaign against the Danes and I could not dissuade her, and so she stood with Ralla, Finan, and me on the steering platform as Ralla’s experienced crew took the
Haligast
downriver.

How many times had I made this voyage? I watched the glistening mudbanks slide past and it was all so familiar as we turned the river’s extravagant bends. We went with the tide, so our thirty oarsmen needed only make small tugs on their looms to keep the ship headed downriver. Swans beat from our path, while overhead the sky was busy with birds flying south. The marshy banks slowly receded as the river widened and imperceptibly turned into a sea reach, and then we headed slightly northward to let the
Haligast
drift along the East Anglian shore.

Again it was all so familiar. I gazed at the drab low land that was called East Sexe. It was edged with wetlands that slowly rose to plowed fields, then, abruptly, there was the great wooded hill that I knew so well. The crown of the hill had been cleared of trees so that it was a dome of grass where the huge fort dominated the Temes. Beamfleot. Æthelflæd had been imprisoned in that fort and she gazed at it wordlessly, though she reached for my hand and held onto it as she remembered those days when she was supposedly a
hostage, but had fallen in love, only to lose the man to his brother’s sword.

Beneath the fort the ground fell steeply to a village, also called Beamfleot, that lay beside the muddy creek of Hothlege. The Hothlege separated Beamfleot from Caninga, a reed-thick island that could be flooded when the tide was high and when the wind blew hard from the east. I could see that the Hothlege was thick with boats, most of them hauled onto the beach beneath the great hill where they were protected by new forts that had been made at the creek’s eastern end. The two forts were a pair of beached and dismasted ships, one on either bank, their seaward planking built up to make high walls. I guessed a chain still ran across the Hothlege to stop enemy vessels entering the narrow channel.

“Closer,” I growled to Ralla.

“You want to run aground?”

“I want to get closer.”

I would have steered the
Haligast
myself except my bee-stung hand was still swollen and the skin taut. I let go of Æthelflæd’s hand to scratch the itch. “It won’t get better if you keep scratching it,” she said, taking my hand back.

Finan had shinned up the
Haligast
’s mast where, with his keen eyesight, he was counting Danish ships. “How many?” I called impatiently.

“Hundreds,” he shouted back and then, a moment later, gave a proper estimate. “About two hundred!” It was impossible to make an accurate count for the masts were thick as saplings, and some boats were dismasted and hidden by other hulls.

“Mary save us,” Æthelflæd said softly and made the sign of the cross.

“Nine thousand men?” Ralla suggested dourly.

“Not as many as that,” I said. Many of the boats belonged to the survivors of Harald’s army and those crews had been half slaughtered at Fearnhamme, yet even so I reckoned Haesten had twice as many men as we had estimated at Gleawecestre. Maybe as many as five thousand, and most of them were even now rampaging
through Mercia, but enough remained at Beamfleot to form a garrison that watched us from their high wall. The sun’s reflection winked from spear-blades, but as I shaded my eyes and gazed at that formidable rampart on its steep hill it seemed to me that the fort was in disrepair. “Finan!” I shouted after a while, “are there gaps in that wall?”

He waited before answering. “They’ve built a new fort, lord! Down on the shore!”

I could not see the new fort from the
Haligast
’s deck, but I trusted Finan, whose eyes were better than mine. He scrambled down the mast after a few moments and explained that Haesten appeared to have abandoned the fort on the hill. “He has watchmen up there, lord, but his main force is down on the creek. There’s a big bastard of a wall there.”

“Why abandon the high ground?” Æthelflæd asked.

“It was too far from the ships,” I said. Haesten knew that better than anyone, for he had fought here before and his men had managed to burn Sigefrid’s ships before the Norseman could bring men down the hill to stop him. Now Haesten had blocked the creek beneath the hill, guarding its seaward end with the beached ships and the landward entrance with a new and formidable fortress. Between those strongholds were his ships. It meant we could probably take the old fort without much trouble, but holding the high ground would not help us because the new stronghold was out of arrow range.

“I couldn’t see very well,” Finan said, “but it looked to me as if the new fort is on an island.”

“He’s making it difficult,” I said mildly.

“Can it be done?” Æthelflæd asked, sounding dubious.

“It has to be done,” I said.

“We have no men!”

“Yet,” I said stubbornly.

Because my plan was to capture that stronghold. It was crammed with Haesten’s prisoners, all the women and children taken as slaves, and it was in Beamfleot’s new fort that his plunder was being
stored. I suspected Haesten’s family was also there, indeed the families of every Dane ravaging Mercia were probably in that place. Their ships were there too, protected by the fort. If we could take the fort we could impoverish Haesten, capture dozens of hostages, and destroy a Danish fleet. If we could capture Beamfleot we would win a victory that would dismay the Danes and cheer every Saxon heart. The victory might not win the war, but it would weaken Haesten immeasurably and many of his followers, losing faith, would abandon him, for what kind of a leader was a man who could not protect his men’s families? Æthelred believed Mercia’s salvation was best secured by waiting for Haesten to attack Gleawecestre, but I believed we had to attack Haesten where he least expected an assault. We had to strike at his base, destroy his fleet, and take back his plunder.

“How many men do you have?” Ralla asked.

“Eighty-three at the last count.”

He laughed. “And how many do you need to capture Beamfleot?”

“Two thousand.”

“And you don’t believe in miracles?” Ralla asked.

Æthelflæd squeezed my hand. “The men will come,” she said, though she sounded far from convinced.

“Maybe,” I said. I was staring at the ships in their sheltered creek and thought, in its way, that Beamfleot was as impregnable as Bebbanburg. “And if they don’t come?” I said softly.

“What will you do?” Æthelflæd asked.

“Take you north,” I said, “take my children north, and fight till I have the silver to raise an army that can capture Bebbanburg.”

She turned her face up to mine. “No,” she said. “I am Mercian now, Uhtred.”

“Mercian and Christian,” I said sourly.

“Yes,” she said, “Mercian and Christian. And what are you, Lord Uhtred?”

I looked to where reflected sunlight winked from the spear-points of the watchmen on Beamfleot’s high hill. “A fool,” I said bitterly, “a fool.”

“My fool,” she said, and stood on tiptoe to kiss my cheek.

“Row!” Ralla bellowed, “row!” He shoved the steering oar hard over so that the
Haligast
turned southward and then west. Two large enemy ships were nosing out of the creek, sliding past the new ship-fortresses, their oar-banks catching the sun as they dipped and rose.

We fled upriver.

And, like the fool I was, I dreamed of capturing Beamfleot.

FOUR

Next day Ealdorman Ælfwold came to Lundene. His lands lay in the northern parts of Saxon Mercia, which made them the most vulnerable to Danish attacks, and he had only kept his estates by the expense of hiring warriors, by bribing the Danes, and by fighting. He was old, a widower, and tired of the struggle. “As soon as the harvest is gathered,” he said, “the Danes come. Rats and Danes, they arrive together.”

He brought nearly three hundred men, most of whom were well armed and properly trained. “They might as well die with you as rot at Gleawecestre,” he remarked. He was homeless because his hall had been burned by one of Haesten’s bands. “I abandoned it,” he admitted. “I’m used to fighting off a couple of hundred of the bastards, but not thousands.” He had sent his household servants, his daughters, and grandchildren to Wessex in the hope they would be safe there. “Are the northern jarls truly planning an attack on Alfred?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

“God help us,” he said.

Folk were moving into the old city. Lundene is really two cities, the Roman one built on the high ground and, to the west, beyond the River Fleot, the new Saxon city. The first was a place of high stone walls and the faded glory of marble pillars, while the other was a malodorous swamp of thatch and wattle, but folk preferred the swamp because they swore the crumbling Roman buildings were haunted by ghosts. Now, fearing Haesten’s men more than any
specter, they were crossing the Fleot and finding themselves shelter in the older houses. The city stank. The Roman sewers had caved in, the cesspits were not large enough, and the streets became fouled. Cattle were penned in the old Roman arena and pigs roamed the streets. Weohstan’s garrison manned the walls, which were high and stout. Most of the battlements were Roman-built, but where time had decayed the stonework there were thick oak palisades.

Finan was leading horsemen north and east every day and brought back news of Danes returning eastward. “They’re taking plunder to Beamfleot,” he said, “plunder and slaves.”

“Are they staying in Beamfleot?”

He shook his head. “They go back to Mercia.” He was angry because we did not have enough men for him to attack the Danish horsemen. He could only watch.

Ralla, scouting downriver in the
Haligast
, saw more Danes arriving from across the sea. Rumors had spread that both Wessex and Mercia were in disarray and the crews were hurrying to share the plunder. Haesten, meanwhile, tore destruction across Mercia’s farmlands while Æthelred waited at Gleawecestre for an attack that never came. Then, the day after Ælfwold brought his housecarls to Lundene, came the news I had been expecting. The Northumbrian fleet had landed in Defnascir and had made a camp above the Uisc, which meant Alfred’s West Saxon army marched to protect Exanceaster.

The Saxons seemed doomed. A week after my foray downriver I sat in the palace hall and watched the fire-cast shadows flicker on the high ceiling. I could hear monks chanting from Erkenwald’s cavernous church, which lay next to the Mercian palace. If I had climbed to the roof I would have seen the glow of fires far to the north and west. Mercia was burning.

That was the night Ælfwold abandoned hope. “We can’t just wait here, lord,” he told me at the evening meal, “the city has enough men to defend it, and my three hundred are needed elsewhere.”

I ate that evening with my usual companions; Æthelflæd, Finan, Ælfwold, Father Pyrlig, and Beornoth. “If I had another three hundred,” I said, and despised myself for saying it. Even if fate brought
me another three hundred warriors I would still not have nearly enough men to capture Beamfleot. Æthelred had won. We had challenged him, we had lost.

“If you were me, lord,” Ælfwold, a shrewd man, asked quietly, “what would you do?”

I gave him an honest answer. “Rejoin Æthelred,” I said, “and persuade him to attack the Danes.”

He crumbled a piece of bread, finding a chip of millstone that he rubbed between his fingers. He was not aware of what he did. He was thinking of the Danes, of the battle he knew must be fought, of the battle he feared would be lost. He shook his head. “Tomorrow,” he said quietly, “I take my men west.” He looked up at me. “I’m sorry.”

“You have no choice,” I said.

I felt like a man who had lost almost everything playing at dice and then, like a fool, had risked all that remained on one last throw. I had failed. What had I thought? That men would come to me because of reputation? Instead they had stayed with their gold-givers. Æthelred did not want me to succeed and so he had opened his chests of silver and offered wealth to men if they joined his army. I needed a thousand men and I could not find them, and without them I could do nothing. I thought bitterly of Iseult’s prophecy made so many years before, that Alfred would give me power, that I would lead a shining horde and have a woman of gold.

That night, in the upper room of the palace where I had a straw mattress, I gazed at the dull glow of distant fires beyond the horizon and I wished I had stayed in Northumbria. I had been drifting, I thought, ever since Gisela’s death. I thought Æthelflæd’s summons had given my life a new purpose, but now I could see no future. I stood at the window, a great stone arch that framed the sky, and I could hear singing from the taverns, the shouts of men arguing, a woman’s laughter, and I thought that Alfred had taken away the power he had given me and the promised shining horde was a half-crew of men who were beginning to doubt my ability to lead them anywhere.

“So what will you do?” Æthelflæd asked from behind me.