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Authors: Rebecca Tingle

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BOOK: The Edge on the Sword
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Descending from the mound she looked back. No sign of the depression at its crest was visible from the pasture below. It hides the horses’ clumsy baths, she thought to herself.

Flæd’s spirits sank as she returned to her warder. Duty brings me back, she sighed, as surely as duty kept my father on the plain at Readingas where the Danish earthwork defeated him so many times. No wonder her father had begun to use fortifications himself after such a crushing blow. She imagined the Danish horde, massed safely behind their protective wall. They would have been able to look down on the West Saxon armies and watch them come from a great distance off. Danish sentries lying flat at the top of the fortification must have been nearly invisible….

All at once Flæd was no longer thinking of her father. Earthwork. A place from which to see, but not be seen. Her mind tumbled over the
beginnings of an idea that had just come to her. She would need to ask Father John more about that passage in the Chronicle she had read. She would need some way to cross an open space undetected. And here was the most difficult thing: Absolutely no one must suspect her until the moment she carried out her plan.

“Three already, Flæd!” The girl jumped at the voice. Caught up in her thoughts, she had hardly noticed as she and Red approached the riverbank where Edward sprawled in the afternoon sun. Now the boy held up a stick with three fish strung along it through the gills, one almost the length of his forearm. “And look.” He pointed to the tangle of bushes on the opposite bank. Flæd saw a flash of green and blue plummet from a branch overhanging the water. Only a ripple, quickly swallowed by the eddying water, showed where the strike had happened, and back on its branch a bright, crested bird raised its beak to swallow the small fish it had captured.

“Kingfisher.” Flæd grinned at her brother. It was a sign of luck to see the little bird. As she seated herself beside Edward, she stole a glance at her warder, who had found his own seat beside a knob of rock upon which he had balanced her copy of the Chronicle. It would take all the luck she could muster, Flæd knew, to make another escape from Red.

9
Mercia Bested

“Y
OU
WANT
TO
KNOW
MORE
ABOUT
EARTHWORK
DEFENSES
.” Father John tapped the open page of Flæd’s Chronicle thoughtfully. “I am not a fighting man, but I have spoken to some who went against the Danes at Readingas. I can tell you what I learned.” Flæd folded her hands and tried to adopt a look of simple curiosity. She had come to her lessons with this question prepared, but her tutor must not guess that she had a special reason for asking. The young priest went on.

“You understand that ‘earthwork’ means a protection built by digging up the ground and piling it high on one side of the pit left by the digging.” Flæd nodded. “The defenders then have a wall overlooking a trench. They can watch their enemies approaching—on a plain such as the one at Readingas, the Danes could see the West Saxon armies coming long before they were close enough to begin combat. When the attackers reach the earthwork, they are slowed by the trench and often halted by the wall. The defenders then have another advantage of height: Their blows and missiles come down upon the enemy, while the attackers must climb and strike upward. Even a smaller force can win a battle with the help of an earthwork defense.”

“The earthwork at Readingas, it was on a plain, by a river?”

“On a plain between two rivers,” Father John corrected her. “The thanes I asked about the battle told me that on some mornings the Danes remained entirely concealed as your father and his brother led their army into the place of battle. An empty rise was all the West Saxons saw, until the Danes chose to show themselves.” Just as I imagined, thought Flæd, feeling a further spark of excitement which she was careful not to reveal to her tutor.

“Of course, there are other earthworks in your father’s holdings, and in the Danelaw,” the priest continued. “Some dykes the men of Rome built when they conquered these lands long before any Saxons made their home here. Many hundreds of years ago a great king of the Mercians also made
a vast earthwork between his own kingdom and the territory of the Welsh princes to the west. When he can, your father tries to use these ancient defenses to strengthen his own borders. And he has a new interest, I understand, in another sort of earthwork….”

“Another sort?” Flæd repeated, cocking her head.

“Yes,” John answered, drawing a wax tablet and stylus toward him. “A kind of fortress designed—I think this is the best way to describe it—like an earthwork wall, only built in a ring.” As the priest spoke, he began to sketch. “The earth from the encircling trench would be piled in the center, here, until the workers had made a hill, a hill which appeared flat at the summit. In fact that even-looking crest was the wall around the rim of a fortress, within which were shelters for people and animals. In times of war folk who farmed the land around such a fortress could bring their families and their beasts into the high fortress for safety. I believe your father has found and occupied several of these places, and is strengthening them for his own army’s defense.”

Flæd looked at the flat-topped hill her tutor had drawn in the wax. My face will betray me now, she thought with a flush. But how could she ignore the way Father John’s picture suggested the natural shape of a hill which figured in her own plans?

Late that afternoon Flæd stood again at the edge of the meadow. She took a few steps out into the open space and raised two fingers to her mouth, making the loud whistle she had seen some townsfolk use to call their animals. For a moment she waited anxiously, looking out into the pasture. Then she saw the little herd of horses coming at a trot. Flæd was ready for them this time, carrying a leather pouch filled with oatcakes she had taken from the kitchen that morning, and a handful of wrinkled brown apples from a basket she had found among the burgh’s winter stores. She fed the horses bits of oatcake and apple, talking to them and stroking them, until her pouch was nearly empty. The horses began to drift away into the pasture one by one, until only two were left standing beside her, eyeing the pouch as she dangled it by the strings.

“So you are the greediest pair,” she scolded, scratching the nearest one beneath his forelock as he nudged at the pouch. In fact they were a matched pair, Flæd could see, dappled grey with lighter grey manes and tails. Their hooves were pale, veined with tiny black streaks, and both had a white stocking on the off hind foot. Flæd remembered these two horses now, twin foals born three winters ago and put to harness just last autumn. She felt sure that both had also felt the weight of a rider during their training.

“Oat,” she named the one who snorted at the last pippin she offered him, but nibbled the cake delicately from her hand. “Apple,” she called his brother, who happily took the fruit and stood swishing his tail as she hung the empty pouch around her neck. These horses were taller and heavier than the pony she and Edward used to share, but Flæd twisted her fingers in Oat’s mane, kilted up her tunic, and took the two running steps she had learned to use when mounting from the ground. As she threw her leg across the horse’s broad back, Oat heaved his sides in a sigh and looked around at her. He lowered his head to the grass, as if protesting the end of his long winter of liberty. But Flæd clucked to bring his head up and pressed her knees together, sending him forward.

She rode Oat along the wall, with Apple tagging curiously beside them. They turned back in the direction from which they had started, and Flæd saw that Red had stepped forward. She nodded to him as she passed with the two horses, and he folded his arms across his chest. Flæd rode Oat in a circle, then made a looping figure, changing his direction by shifting her weight to one side, then the other. Finally she brought him to a stand by settling back and softly giving the command a driver uses to halt a team. She patted the horse’s neck and glanced sideways at the Mercian. He ran his fingers through his short brush of hair with an unreadable expression on his hard face. Then he went back to his seat beside the wall.

The next afternoon Flæd called the herd again, but this time fed only the matched pair. She rode Apple, and found his trot a little harder, and his canter a little longer than Oat’s. But both horses had the same willing response to her weight upon their backs and her quiet words, even without saddle or bridle. “You have sold your freedom,” she lectured them after the ride, “for a bit of sweet food and a scratch behind the ear.” With a slap on Apple’s rump, she sent them off.

Flæd came to the pasture every day after her lessons, and every day she rode a little further into the meadow. She found she could ride either horse in a variety of positions: crouched on the withers, stretched out along its back, or even with her arms clasped awkwardly around the horse’s neck, as long as she continued to urge it forward. The horses took no notice of any amount of mane-pulling, she had discovered as she wrapped her hands in the long hair to steady herself at a gallop, or to ease herself to the ground when their ride had finished. Oat and Apple were tall, and she would have to hang briefly, suspending almost her whole weight from the mane as she brought her right leg over the horse’s back and then dropped two-footed onto the ground.

She hesitated for a moment as she was dismounting one afternoon, hanging from the mane and keeping one toe hooked across Oat’s back. A
person on the other side of the horse, where Red is sitting, could hardly see me, she thought to herself, and slipped a little lower, thinking about this odd position. Impatient, Oat took a few steps forward, and Flæd swung wildly for a second, bringing her other foot up to hook the back of her left big toe around the bones at the base of Oat’s neck. Now I am truly a foolish sight, Flæd thought in some confusion as she hung almost upside down on one side of her horse. Why didn’t I dismount? Then she had a thought which made her lower her feet and drop to the ground very quickly in the hope that Red had not seen her hanging there, and not because she feared his opinion of her foolishness. If her idea worked, she had found a way around the final obstacle to her scheme.

The next day Flæd rode Oat out far enough that she could barely see her warder in his place against the yellow wall. She walked her horse with his near side—the side on which he had been trained to let a rider mount—toward the river, and his other side toward the burgh. Softly she repeated the command to go forward and slipped halfway down on the left side, as if dismounting. Oat balked, but at her insistence kept walking, and Flæd brought her other foot up to his withers as she had the day before. This was awkward, but not impossible, not even very difficult, she thought as she swung along, her braid brushing the grass beside Oat’s feet. She clucked to him, urging him into a trot, but at the first jounces of the new gait she felt her fingers slipping in the mane, and with a grunt she fell, rolling to keep away from the horse’s hooves. She lay there looking up at the sky, breathing hard and feeling slightly bruised as Oat came back and lowered his nose to the familiar pouch on its string around her neck. He nibbled at the leather. Apple, always close behind, joined them, staring at the prostrate human. At least Red didn’t see, Flæd thought.

Through the remainder of the week Flæd experimented with the strange new riding stance, and found that if she wove a knot into the horse’s mane she could slip to the side during a canter or a gallop, and even pull herself back up again without the difficulty the jarring trot gave her. Far from the wall she practiced, first tucking the end of her braid between her teeth and urging her mount into a gallop, and then slipping down to cling to the horse’s flank. Afterward she would trot with her dappled pair back to the burgh wall, where Red was always waiting. Dismounting with a last word of praise for the greys, she would go back through the narrowing gap in the wall, Red close behind her, and pass through the streets on her way to evensong and supper.

On one such night she met Asser and her father. “Æthelflæd,” the king smiled as he caught sight of her, “you have been in the wind on the
meadow, I see. Your head is as shaggy as the horses’ winter coats.” Flæd tucked the strands of hair behind her ears.

“Their coats are almost smooth now,” she told him.

“I see,” Alfred said, turning her around, “that you have decided to wear their winter dress for them.” Her clothes were covered with long grey hairs. “We will not send these clothes with you to Mercia,” Alfred said thoughtfully. “Ethelred will hardly expect his bride to arrive in a hair shirt.”

Flæd could not reply—the joke reminded her painfully of a journey she refused to contemplate. She brushed at her tunic, and felt her father’s light hand upon her head for a moment before he and Asser continued on.

“My lady,” Asser said as he passed, “how go your lessons ? Have you learned some new skill since last we spoke?”

Flæd considered several answers she could give to such a question. “My writing on parchment is much improved,” she said with a solemn nod.

That night Flæd stared at the moon through the open window above her bed. She had believed that she had surmounted every challenge in the way of her plan, but tonight she had to face one last quandary. A part of her felt sure that carrying out her scheme would betray her unspoken agreement with Red, as well as her understanding with her father. They trust me, she thought. Then she remembered Red’s compromise at the marsh: He had let her go in again, without knowing exactly where she would hide herself. Is my plan for tomorrow so different, Flæd wondered. She turned the dilemma over in her mind until the half-circle of moon climbed higher into the sky, and she slept.

Flæd stood at the edge of the meadow and raised ink-stained fingers to her mouth to whistle for the horses. My writing
has
improved, she thought, inspecting the black marks on her skin. Now I blot my hands more than the page. Apple and Oat trotted up alone—the other horses stayed nose-deep in the sweet grass.

BOOK: The Edge on the Sword
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