The Burning Land (37 page)

I had not heard her come. Her bare feet made no sound on the stone floor. “I don’t know,” I admitted.

She came and stood beside me. She touched my hand where it rested on the sill, tracing the ball of my thumb with a gentle finger. “The swelling has gone,” she said.

“The itch too,” I said.

“See?” she asked, amusement in her voice, “the sting was no omen.”

“It was,” I said, “but I’ve yet to discover what it means.”

She left her hand on mine, her touch light as a feather. “Father Pyrlig says I have a choice.”

“Which is?”

“To go back to Æthelred or find a nunnery in Wessex.”

I nodded. Monks still chanted in the church, their droning punctuated by laughter and singing from the taverns. Folk were seeking oblivion in ale or else they were praying. They all knew what the fires of the burning sky meant, that the end was coming. “Did you turn my eldest son into a Christian?” I asked.

“No,” Æthelflæd said, “he found it for himself.”

“I’ll take him north,” I said, “and beat the nonsense out of him.” Æthelflæd said nothing to that, just pressed her hand on mine. “A nunnery?” I asked bleakly.

“I’m married,” she said, “and the church tells me that if I am not with my God-given husband then I must be seen to be virtuous.” I was still gazing at the fire-smeared horizon where the flames lit the underside of clouds. Above Lundene the sky was clear so that moonlight cast sharp shadows from the edges of the Roman roof tiles. Æthelflæd leaned her head on my shoulder. “What are you thinking?”

“That unless we defeat the Danes there’ll be no convents left.”

“Then what will I do?” she asked lightly.

I smiled. “Father Beocca liked to talk of the wheel of fortune,” I said, and wondered why I had spoken of him as if he lay in the past. Did I see the end coming? Would those distant fires creep ever closer till they burned Lundene and seared the last Saxon from Britain?
“At Fearnhamme,” I said, “I was your father’s warlord. Now I’m a fugitive with not enough men to fill a ship’s benches.”

“My father calls you his miracle worker,” Æthelflæd said. “True,” she said when I laughed, “that’s what he calls you.”

“I could work him a miracle,” I said bitterly, “if he gave me men.” I thought again of Iseult’s prophecy, how Alfred would give me power and my woman would be golden, and that was when I turned at last from the distant fires and looked down at Æthelflæd’s golden hair and took her into my arms.

And next day Ælfwold would leave Lundene and I would be left powerless.

Three horsemen came first. They arrived in the dawn, galloping across the Fleot’s filthy valley and up to the city gates. I heard the horn calling from the ramparts and I threw on clothes, pulled on boots, kissed Æthelflæd, and ran down the stairs to the palace’s hall just as the door was thrown open and the three mailed men strode in, their feet splintering the already splintered tiles. Their leader was tall, grim and bearded. He stopped two paces from me. “You must have some ale in this shit-stinking city,” he said. I was staring with disbelief. “I need breakfast,” he demanded, and then could not help himself. He laughed. It was Steapa, and with him were two younger men, both warriors. I shouted for the servants to bring food and ale, still hardly believing that Steapa had come. “I’m bringing you twelve hundred men,” he said briskly.

For a moment I could hardly speak. “Twelve hundred?” I echoed feebly.

“Alfred’s best,” Steapa said, “and the Ætheling is coming too.”

“Edward?” I was too astonished to make any sensible response.

“Edward and twelve hundred of Alfred’s best men. We rode ahead of them,” he explained, then turned and bowed as Æthelflæd, swathed in a great cloak, entered the hall. “Your father sends his greetings, lady,” he said.

“And he sends your brother,” I said, “with twelve hundred men.”

“God be praised,” Æthelflæd said.

The hall filled as the news spread. My children were there, and Bishop Erkenwald and Ælfwold and Father Pyrlig, then Finan and Weohstan. “The Ætheling Edward will lead the forces,” Steapa said, “but he is to accept Lord Uhtred’s guidance.”

Bishop Erkenwald looked astonished. He was glancing from Æthelflæd to me and I could tell he was scenting sin with the eagerness of a terrier smelling a fox’s earth. “The king sent you?” he asked Steapa.

“Yes, lord.”

“But what of the Danes in Defnascir?”

“They’re just scratching…” Steapa said, then reddened because he had almost said something that he thought would offend the bishop, let alone a king’s daughter.

“Scratching their arses?” I finished for him.

“They’re doing nothing, my lady,” Steapa muttered. He was the son of slaves and, for all his eminence as the commander of Alfred’s bodyguard, he was awed by Æthelflæd’s presence. “But the king wants his men back soon, lord,” Steapa said, looking at me, “just in case the Northumbrian Danes do wake up.”

“So finish your breakfast,” I said, “then ride back to Edward. Tell him he’s not to enter the city.” I did not want the West Saxon army inside Lundene with its tempting taverns and whores. “He’s to march north around the city,” I ordered, “and keep marching east.”

Steapa frowned. “He’s expecting to find supplies here.”

I looked at Bishop Erkenwald. “You’ll send food and ale to the army. Weohstan’s garrison will provide escorts.”

The bishop, offended by my peremptory tone, hesitated, then nodded. He knew I spoke now with Alfred’s authority. “Where do I send the supplies?” he asked.

“You remember Thunresleam?” I asked Steapa.

“The old hall on the hill, lord?”

“Edward’s to meet me there. You too.” I looked back to the bishop. “Send the supplies there.”

“To Thunresleam?” Bishop Erkenwald asked suspiciously, smelling still more sin because the name reeked of paganism.

“Thor’s Grove,” I confirmed. “It’s close to Beamfleot.” The bishop made the sign of the cross, but he dared not protest. “You and one hundred of your men are coming with me,” I told Weohstan.

“My orders are to defend Lundene,” Weohstan said uncertainly.

“If we’re at Beamfleot,” I said, “there’ll be no Danes threatening Lundene. We march in two hours.”

It took nearer four hours, but with Ælfwold’s Mercians, Weohstan’s West Saxons, and my own men we numbered over four hundred mounted warriors who clattered through the city’s eastern gate. I left my children in the care of Æthelflæd’s servants. Æthelflæd insisted on riding with us. I argued against that, telling her she should not risk her life, but she refused to stay in Lundene. “Didn’t you take an oath to serve me?” she asked.

“More fool me, yes.”

“Then I give the orders,” she said, smiling.

“Yes, my duck,” I said, and earned a thump on the arm. At the beginning of their marriage Æthelred had always called Æthelflæd “my duck,” an endearment that annoyed her. So now she rode beneath my banner of the wolf’s head, Weohstan flew the West Saxon dragon, while Ælfwold’s Mercians displayed a long flag showing the Christian cross. “I want my own banner,” Æthelflæd told me.

“Then make one,” I said.

“It will show geese,” she said.

“Geese! Not ducks?”

She made a face at me. “Geese are Saint Werburgh’s symbol,” she explained. “There was a huge flock of geese ravaging a cornfield and she prayed and God sent the geese away. It was a miracle!”

“The abbess at Lecelad did that?”

“No, no! The abbess was named after Saint Werburgh. The saint died a long time ago. Maybe I’ll show her on my banner. I know she protects me! I prayed to her last night and see what she did?” She gestured at the men following us. “My prayers were answered!”

I wondered if she had prayed before or after she had come to my room, but decided that was a question best left unasked.

We rode just north of the drab marshes that edged the Temes.
This was East Anglian territory, but there were no great estates close to Lundene. There had once been beamed halls and busy villages, but the frequent raids and counter-raids had left the halls in ashes and the villages in terror. The Danish King Eohric of East Anglia was supposedly a Christian and had signed a peace treaty with Alfred, agreeing that his Danes would stay away from both Mercia and Wessex, but the two kings might as well have signed an agreement to stop men drinking ale. The Danes were forever crossing the frontier and the Saxons retaliated, and so we rode past impoverished settlements. The people saw us coming and fled to the marshes or else to the woods on the few small hills. We ignored them.

Beamfleot lay at the southern end of the great line of hills which barred our path. Most of the hills were heavily wooded, though above the village, where the slopes were highest and steepest, we could see the old fort which had been made on the grassy dome above the river. We swerved northward, climbing a steep track which led to Thunresleam, and we rode cautiously because the Danes would have seen us coming and they could easily have sent a force to attack us as we rode uphill through the thick trees. I expected that attack. I had sent Æthelflæd and her two maidservants to the center of our column and had ordered every man to ride with his shield looped onto his arms and weapons ready. I listened for the sound of birds fleeing through the leaves, for the clink of harness, for the thud of a hoof on leaf mold, for the sudden shout that would announce a charge of Viking horsemen from the hill above, but the only birds clattering through the leaves were the pigeons we ourselves scared away. The defenders of Beamfleot had evidently yielded the hill to us, and not one Dane tried to stop us.

“That’s crazy,” Finan said as we reached the crest. “They could have killed a score of us.”

“They’re confident,” I said. “They must know the walls of their fort will stop us.”

“Or else they don’t know their business,” Finan said.

“When did you last meet a Dane who didn’t know how to fight?”

We sent men to scout the surrounding trees as we approached
the old hall at Thunresleam, but still no enemy appeared. We had been to this hall years before, back when we had negotiated with the Norsemen, Sigefrid and Erik, and afterward we had fought a bitter battle in the creek beneath the fort. Those events seemed so distant now and both Sigefrid and Erik were dead. Haesten had survived that long ago fight, and now I had come to oppose him again, though none of us knew whether Haesten himself had returned to Beamfleot. Rumor said he was still ravaging Mercia, which implied he was confident that Beamfleot’s garrison could protect itself.

The oak-beamed hall at Thunresleam would be at the center of my camp. It had once been a magnificent building, but it had been abandoned many years before and the pillars were rotting and the thatch was black, damp and sagging. The great beams were thick with bird droppings while the floor was a mass of weeds. Just outside the hall was a stone pillar about the height of a man. There was a hole through the stone that was filled with pebbles and scraps of cloth, the votive offerings left by the local folk who had fled our arrival. Their village was a mile eastward and I knew it had a church, but the Christians of Thunresleam understood that their high place and old hall were sacred to Thor and so they still came and sent prayers to that older god. Mankind can never be too safe. I might not like the Christian god, but I do not deny his existence and, at hard moments in my life, I have sent prayers to him as well as to my own gods.

“Shall we make a palisade?” Weohstan asked me.

“No.”

He stared at me. “No?”

“Clear out as many trees as you can,” I ordered him, “but no palisade.”

“But…”

“No palisade!”

I was taking a risk, but if I made a palisade I would give my men a place of safety and I knew how reluctant men were to abandon such security. I had often noticed how a bull, brought for entertainment to some feast, will adopt a patch of land as its refuge and defend it
self from the attacking dogs with a terrible ferocity so long as it stays in its chosen refuge, but goad the bull out and it loses confidence and the dogs sense the vulnerability and attack with a renewed savagery. I did not want my men to feel safe. I wanted them nervous and alert. I wanted them to know that safety lay not in a fort of their own making, but in capturing the enemy’s fort. And I wanted that capture to be quick.

I ordered Ælfwold’s men to cut trees to the west, clearing the woods back to the hill’s edge and beyond so we could see far across the country toward Lundene. If the Danes brought men back from Mercia I wanted to see them. I put Osferth in charge of our sentries. Their job was to make a screen between us and Beamfleot to warn of any sally by the Danes. Those sentries were in the woods, hidden from the old high fort, and if the Danes came I expected to fight them among the trees. Osferth’s men would slow them until my whole force could be brought against the attackers, and I ordered that every man was to sleep wearing his mail coat and with his weapons close by.

I asked Ælfwold to protect our northern and western flanks. His men would watch for the approach of our supplies and guard against reinforcements coming from Haesten’s men who still smeared the far horizon with smoke. Then, those orders given, I took fifty men to explore the country about our encampment that rang with the sound of axes biting into trees. Finan, Pyrlig, and Osferth accompanied me, as did Æthelflæd who ignored all my advice to stay out of danger.

We went first to the village of Thunresleam. It was a straggle of thick-thatched cottages built about the scorched and collapsed ruin of a church. The villagers had fled when we climbed the hill, but a few braver souls now appeared from the woods beyond their small fields where the first shoots of wheat, barley, and rye greened the furrows. They were Saxons and the first to approach us were led by a burly peasant with matted brown hair, one eye, and work-blackened hands. He looked up at Ælfwold’s banner that showed the Christian cross. I had borrowed the banner to make it clear we
were not Danes, and the cross evidently reassured the one-eyed man who knelt to us and beckoned for his companions to kneel. “I am Father Heahberht,” he said.

He told me he was priest to the village and to two other settlements farther east. “You don’t look like a priest,” I said.