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‘No,’ I said. ‘I came to see Wulfhere.’
‘The ealdorman is in church,’ Æthelwold said, ‘and I am not.’ He grinned and waved to the bench opposite him. ‘Sit and drink. Get drunk. Then we’ll find two girls. Three, if you like. Four, if you want?’
‘You forget I’m married,’ I said.
‘As if that ever stopped anyone.’
I sat and one of the maids brought me ale. ‘Are you in the Witan?’ I asked Æthelwold.
‘What do you think? You think that bastard wants my advice? “Lord king,” I’d say, “why don’t you jump off a high cliff and pray that God gives you wings.”’ He pushed a plate of pork ribs towards me. ‘I’m here so they can keep an eye on me. They’re making sure I’m not plotting treason.’
‘Are you?’
‘Of course I am.’ He grinned. ‘Are you going to join me? You do owe me a favour.’
‘You want my sword at your service?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ He was serious.
‘So it’s you and me,’ I said, ‘against all Wessex. Who else will fight with us?’
He frowned, thinking, but came up with no names. He stared down at the table and I felt sorry for him. I had always liked Æthelwold, but no one would ever trust him for he was as careless as he was irresponsible. Alfred, I thought, had judged him right. Let him be free and he would drink and whore himself into irrelevance. ‘What I should do,’ he said, ‘is go and join Guthrum.’
‘Why don’t you?’
He looked up at me, but had no answer. Maybe he knew the answer, that Guthrum would welcome him, honour him, use him and eventually kill him. But maybe that was a better prospect than his present life. He shrugged and leaned back, pushing hair off his face. He was a startlingly handsome young man, and that too distracted him, for girls were attracted to him like priests to gold. ‘What Wulfhere thinks,’ he said, his voice slurring slightly, ‘is that Guthrum is going to come and kill us all.’
‘Probably,’ I said.
‘And if my uncle dies,’ he said, not bothering to lower his voice even though there were a score of men in the tavern, ‘his son is much too young to be king.’
‘True.’
‘So it’ll be my turn!’ He smiled.
‘Or Guthrum’s turn,’ I said.
‘So drink, my friend,’ he said, ‘because we’re all in the cesspit.’ He grinned at me, his charm suddenly evident. ‘So if you won’t fight for me,’ he asked, ‘how do you propose to pay back the favour?’
‘How would you like it paid?’
‘You could kill Abbot Hewald? Very nastily? Slowly?’
‘I could do that,’ I said. Hewald was abbot at Winburnan and famous for the harshness with which he taught boys to read.
‘On the other hand,’ Æthelwold went on, ‘I’d like to kill that scrawny bastard myself, so don’t do it for me, I’ll think of something that won’t make my uncle happy. You don’t like him, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Then we’ll brew up some mischief. Oh God,’ this last imprecation was because Wulfhere’s voice was suddenly loud just outside the door. ‘He’s angry at me.’
‘Why?’
‘One of the dairymaids is pregnant. I think he wanted to do it himself, but I churned her first.’ He drained his ale. ‘I’m going to the Three Bells. Want to come?’
‘I have to speak to Wulfhere.’
Æthelwold left by the back door as the ealdorman ducked through the front. Wulfhere was accompanied by a dozen thegns, but he saw me and crossed the room. ‘They’ve been reconsecrating the bishop’s church,’ he grumbled. ‘Hours upon damned hours! Nothing but chanting and prayers, hours of prayers just to get the taint of the Danes out of the place.’ He sat heavily. ‘Did I see Æthelwold here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wanted you to join his rebellion, did he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Damned fool. So why are you here? Come to offer me your sword?’ He meant swear my allegiance to him and so become his warrior.
‘I want to see one of the hostages,’ I said, ‘so I seek your permission.’
‘Hostages,’ he snapped his fingers for ale. ‘Damned hostages. I’ve had to make new buildings to house them. And who pays for that?’
‘You do?’
‘Of course I do. And I’m supposed to feed them too? Feed them? Guard them? Wall them in? And does Alfred pay anything?’
‘Tell him you’re building a monastery,’ I suggested.
He looked at me as if I were mad, then saw the jest and laughed. ‘True enough, he’d pay me then, wouldn’t he? Have you heard about the monastery they’re building at Cynuit?’
‘I hear it’s to have an altar of gold.’
He laughed again. ‘That’s what I hear. I don’t believe it, but I hear it.’ He watched one of the tavern girls cross the floor. ‘It’s not my permission you need to see the hostages,’ he said, ‘but Alfred’s, and he won’t give it to you.’
‘Alfred’s permission?’ I asked.
‘They’re not just hostages,’ he said, ‘but prisoners. I have to wall them in and watch them day and night. Alfred’s orders. He might think God brought us peace, but he’s made damn sure he’s got high-born hostages. Six earls! You know how many retainers they have? How many women? How many mouths to feed?’
‘If I go to Wiltunscir,’ I said, ‘can I see Earl Ragnar?’
Wulfhere frowned at me. ‘Earl Ragnar? The noisy one? I like him. No, lad, you can’t, because no one’s allowed to see them except a damned priest who talks their language. Alfred sent him and he’s trying to make them into Christians, and if you go without my permission then Alfred will hear you’ve been there and he’ll want an explanation from me. No one can see the poor bastards.’ He paused to scratch at a louse under his collar. ‘I have to feed the priest too, and Alfred doesn’t pay for that either. He doesn’t even pay me to feed that lout Æthelwold!’
‘When I was a hostage in Werham,’ I explained, ‘Earl Ragnar saved my life. Guthrum killed the others, but Ragnar guarded me. He said they’d have to kill him before they killed me.’
‘And he looks like a hard man to kill,’ Wulfhere said, ‘but if Guthrum attacks Wessex that’s what I’m supposed to do. Kill the lot of them. Maybe not the women.’ He stared gloomily into the tavern’s yard where a group of his men were playing dice in the moonlight. ‘And Guthrum will attack,’ he added in a low voice.
‘That’s not what I hear.’
He looked at me suspiciously ‘And what do you hear, young man?’
‘That God has sent us peace.’
Wulfhere laughed at my mockery. ‘Guthrum’s in Gleawecestre,’ he said, ‘and that’s just a half day’s march from our frontier. And they say more Danish ships arrive every day. They’re in Lundene, they’re in the Humber, they’re in the Gewæsc.’ He scowled. ‘More ships, more men, and Alfred’s building churches! And there’s this fellow Svein.’
‘Svein?’
‘Brought his ships from Ireland. Bastard’s in Wales now, but he won’t stay there, will he? He’ll come to Wessex. And they say more Danes are joining him from Ireland.’ He brooded on this bad news. I did not know whether it was true, for such rumours were ever current, but Wulfhere plainly believed it. ‘We should march on Gleawecestre,’ he said, ‘and slaughter the lot of them before they slaughter us, but we’ve got a kingdom ruled by priests.’
That was true, I thought, just as it was certain that Wulfhere would not make it easy for me to see Ragnar. ‘Will you give a message to Ragnar?’ I asked.
‘How? I don’t speak Danish. I could ask the priest, but he’ll tell Alfred.’
‘Does Ragnar have a woman with him?’ I asked.
‘They all do.’
‘A thin girl,’ I said, ‘black hair. Face like a hawk.’
He nodded cautiously. ‘Sounds right. Has a dog, yes?’
‘She has a dog,’ I said, ‘and its name is Nihtgenga.’
He shrugged as if he did not care what the dog was called, then he understood the significance of the name. ‘An English name?’ he asked. ‘A Danish girl calls her dog Goblin?’
‘She isn’t Danish,’ I said. ‘Her name is Brida, and she’s a Saxon.’
He stared at me, then laughed. ‘The cunning little bitch. She’s been listening to us, hasn’t she?’
Brida was indeed cunning. She had been my first lover, an East Anglian girl who had been raised by Ragnar’s father and who now slept with Ragnar. ‘Talk to her,’ I said, ‘and give her my greetings, and say that if it comes to war …’ I paused, not sure what to say. There was no point in promising to do my best to rescue Ragnar, for if war came then the hostages would be slaughtered long before I could reach them.
‘If it comes to war?’ Wulfhere prompted me.
‘If it comes to war,’ I said, repeating the words he had spoken to me before my penance, ‘we’ll all be looking for a way to stay alive.’
Wulfhere stared at me for a long time and his silence told me that though I had failed to find a message for Ragnar I had given a message to Wulfhere. He drank ale. ‘So the bitch speaks English, does she?’
‘She’s a Saxon.’
As was I, but I hated Alfred and I would join Ragnar when I could, if I could, whatever Mildrith wanted, or so I thought. But deep under the earth, where the corpse serpent gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, there are three spinners. Three women who make our fate. We might believe we make choices, but in truth our lives are in the spinners’ fingers. They make our lives, and destiny is everything. The Danes know that, and even the Christians know it. Wyrd bið ful aræd, we Saxons say, fate is inexorable, and the spinners had decided my fate because, a week after the Witan had met, when Exanceaster was quiet again, they sent me a ship.
The first I knew of it was when a slave came running from Oxton’s fields saying that there was a Danish ship in the estuary of the Uisc and I pulled on boots and mail, snatched my swords from their peg, shouted for a horse to be saddled and rode to the foreshore where Heahengel rotted.
And where, standing in from the long sandspit that protects the Uisc from the greater sea, another ship approached. Her sail was furled on the long yard and her dripping oars rose and fell like wings and her long hull left a spreading wake that glittered silver under the rising sun. Her prow was high, and standing there was a man in full mail, a man with a helmet and spear, and behind me, where a few fisherfolk lived in hovels beside the mud, people were hurrying towards the hills and taking with them whatever few possessions they could snatch. I called to one of them. ‘It’s not a Dane!’
‘Lord?’
‘It’s a West Saxon ship,’ I called, though they did not believe me and hurried away with their livestock. For years they had done this. They would see a ship and they would run, for ships brought Danes and Danes brought death, but this ship had no dragon or wolf or eagle’s head on its prow. I knew the ship. It was the Eftwyrd, the best named of all Alfred’s ships which otherwise bore pious names like Heahengel or Apostol or Cristenlic. Eftwyrd meant judgement day which, though Christian in inspiration, accurately described what she had brought to many Danes.
The man in the prow waved and, for the first time since I had crawled on my knees to Alfred’s altar, my spirits lifted. It was Leofric, and then the Eftwyrd’s bows slid onto the mud and the long hull juddered to a halt. Leofric cupped his hands. ‘How deep is this mud?’
‘It’s nothing!’ I shouted back, ‘a hand’s depth, no more!’
‘Can I walk on it?’
‘Of course you can!’ I shouted back.
He jumped and, as I had known he would, sank up to his thighs in the thick black slime, and I bent over my saddle’s pommel in laughter, and the Eftwyrd’s crew laughed with me as Leofric cursed, and it took ten minutes to extricate him from the muck, by which time a score of us were plastered in the stinking stuff, but then the crew, who were mostly my old oarsmen and warriors, brought ale ashore, and bread and salted pork, and we made a midday meal beside the rising tide.
‘You’re an earsling,’ Leofric grumbled, looking at the mud clogging up the links of his mail coat.
‘I’m a bored earsling,’ I said.
‘You’re bored?’ Leofric said, ‘so are we.’ It seemed the fleet was not sailing. It had been given into the charge of a man named Burgweard who was a dull, worthy soldier whose brother was bishop of Scireburnan, and Burgweard had orders not to disturb the peace. ‘If the Danes aren’t off the coast,’ Leofric said, ‘then we aren’t.’
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘He sent us to rescue that piece of shit,’ he nodded at Heahengel. ‘He wants twelve ships again, see?’
‘I thought they were building more?’
‘They were building more, only it all stopped because some thieving bastards stole the timber while we were fighting at Cynuit, and then someone remembered Heahengel and here we are. Burgweard can’t manage with just eleven.’
‘If he isn’t sailing,’ I asked, ‘why does he want another ship?’
‘In case he has to sail,’ Leofric explained, ‘and if he does then he wants twelve. Not eleven, twelve.’
‘Twelve? Why?’
‘Because,’ Leofric paused to bite off a piece of bread, ‘because it says in the gospel book that Christ sent out his disciples two by two, and that’s how we have to go, two ships together, all holy, and if we’ve only got eleven then that means we’ve only got ten, if you follow me.’
I stared at him, not sure whether he was jesting. ‘Burgweard insists you sail two by two?’
Leofric nodded. ‘Because it says so in Father Willibald’s book.’
‘In the gospel book?’
‘That’s what Father Willibald tells us,’ Leofric said with a straight face, then saw my expression and shrugged. ‘Honest! And Alfred approves.’
‘Of course he does.’
‘And if you do what the gospel book tells you,’ Leofric said, still with a straight face, ‘then nothing can go wrong, can it?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘So you’re here to rebuild Heahengel?’
‘New mast,’ Leofric said, ‘new sail, new rigging, patch up those timbers, caulk her, then tow her back to Hamtun. It could take a month!’
‘At least.’
‘And I never was much good at making things. Good at fighting, I am, and I can drink ale as well as any man, but I was never much good with a mallet and wedge or with adzes. They are.’ He nodded at a group of a dozen men who were strangers to me.
