The Pale Horseman (32 page)

'You look thoughtful, Uhtred,' Alfred interrupted my reverie.

'I was thinking, lord,' I said, 'that we need warm food.' I fed the fire, then went outside
to the stream where I knocked away the skim of ice and scooped water into a pot. Steapa had
followed me outside, not to talk, but to piss, and I stood behind him.

'At the witanegemot,' I said, 'you lied about Cynuit.'

He tied the scrap of rope that served as a belt and turned to look at me. 'If the Danes had
not come,' he said in his growling voice, 'I would have killed you.'

I did not argue with that, for he was probably right.

'At Cynuit,' I said instead, 'when Ubba died, where were you?'

'There.'

'I didn't see you,' I said. 'I was in the thick of the battle, but I didn't see you.'

'You think I wasn't there?' he was angry.

'You were with Odda the Younger?' I asked, and he nodded. 'You were with him,' I
guessed,

'because his father told you to protect him?' He nodded again. And Odda the Younger,' I
said, 'stayed a long way from any danger. Isn't that right?'

He did not answer, but his silence told me I was right. He decided he had nothing more to
say to me so started back towards the mill, but I pulled on his arm to stop him. He was
surprised by that. Steapa was so big and so strong and so feared that he was unused to men
using force on him, and I could see the slow anger burning in him. I fed it. 'You were Odda's
nursemaid,' I sneered. 'The great Steapa Snotor was a nursemaid. Other men faced and fought
the Danes and you just held Odda's hand.'

He just stared at me. His face, so tight-skinned and expressionless, was like an animal's
gaze, nothing there but hunger and anger and violence. He wanted to kill me, especially
after I used his nickname, but I understood something more about Steapa Snotor. He was
truly stupid. He would kill me if he was ordered to kill me, but without someone to instruct
him he did not know what to do, so I thrust the pot of water at hire. 'Carry that inside,' I
told him. He hesitated. 'Don't stand there like a dumb ox!' I snapped. 'Take it! And don't
spill it.' He took the pot. 'It has to go on the fire,' I told him,

'and next time we fight the Danes you'll be with me.'

'You?'

'Because we are warriors,' I said, 'and our job is to kill our enemies, not be nursemaids
to weaklings.'

I collected firewood, then went inside to find Alfred staring at nothing and Steapa
sitting beside Hild who now seemed to be consoling him rather than being consoled. I
crumbled oatcakes and dried fish into the water and stirred the mess with a stick. It was a
gruel of sorts and tasted horrible, but it was hot.

That night it stopped snowing and next morning we went home.

Alfred need not have gone to Cippanhamm. Anything he learned there he could have
discovered by sending spies, but he had insisted on going himself and he came back more
worried than before. He had learned some good things, that Guthrum did not have the men to
subjugate all Wessex and so was waiting for reinforcements, but he had also learned that
Guthrum was trying to turn the nobility of Wessex to his side. Wulfhere was sworn to the
Danes, who else?

'Will the fyrd of Wiltunscir fight for Wulfhere?' he asked us.

Of course they would fight for Wulfhere. Most of the men in Wiltunscir were loyal to their
lord, and if their lord ordered them to follow his banner to war then they would march. Those
men who were in the parts of the shire not occupied by the Danes might go to Alfred, but the
rest would do what they always did, follow their lord. And other Ealdormen, seeing that
Wulfhere had not lost his estates, would reckon that their own future, and their family's
safety, lay with the Danes. The Danes had ever worked that way. Their armies were too small and
too disorganised to defeat a great kingdom so they recruited lords of the kingdom,
flattered them, even made them into kings, and only when they were secure did they turn on
those Saxons and kill them.

So back in Æthelingaeg Alfred did what he did best. He wrote letters. He wrote letters to
all his nobility, and messengers were sent into every corner of Wessex to find
Ealdormen, thegns and bishops, and deliver the letters. I am alive, the scraps of
parchment said, and after Easter I shall take Wessex from the pagans, and you will help me.
We waited for the replies.

'You must teach me to read,' Iseult said when I told her about the letters.

‘Why?'

'It is a magic,' she said.

'What magic? So you can read psalms?'

'Words are like breath,' she said, 'you say them and they're gone. But writing traps them.
You could write down stories, poems.'

'Hild will teach you,' I said, and the nun did, scratching letters in the mud. I watched
them sometimes and thought they could have been taken for sisters except one had hair black
as a raven's wing and the other had hair of pale gold.

So Iseult learned her letters and I practised the men with their weapons and shields until
they were too tired to curse me, and we also made a new fortress. We restored one of the
beamwegs that led south to the hills at the edge of the swamp, and where that log road met dry
land we made a strong fort of earth and tree-trunks. None of Guthrum's men tried to stop the
work, though we saw Danes watching us from the higher hills, and by the time Guthrum
understood what we were doing the fort was finished.

In late February a hundred Danes came to challenge it, but they saw the thorn palisade
protecting the ditch, saw the strength of the log wall behind the ditch, saw our spears thick
against the sky and rode away.

Next day I took sixty men to the farm where we had seen the Danish horses. They were gone,
and the farm was burned out. We rode inland, seeing no enemy. We found newborn lambs
slaughtered by foxes, but no Danes, and from that day on we rode ever deeper into Wessex,
carrying the message that the king lived and fought, and some days we met Danish bands, but
we only fought if we outnumbered them for we could not afford to lose men.

Ælswith gave birth to a daughter whom she and Alfred called Æthelgifu. Ælswith wanted
to leave the swamp. She knew that Huppa of Thornsaeta was holding Dornwaraceaster for the
Ealdorman had replied to Alfred's letter saying that the town was secure and, as soon as
Alfred demanded it, the fyrd of Thornsaeta would march to his aid. Dornwaraceaster was not
so large as Cippanhamm, but it had Roman walls and Ælswith was tired of living in the
marshes, tired of the endless damp, of the chill mists, and she said her newborn baby would
die of the cold, and that Edward's sickness would come back, and Bishop Alewold supported
her. He had a vision of a large house in Dornwaraceaster, of warm fires and priestly
comfort, but Alfred refused. If he moved to Dornwaraceaster then the Danes would
immediately abandon Cippanhamm and besiege Alfred and starvation would soon threaten
the garrison, but in the swamp there was food. In Dornwaraceaster Alfred would be a
prisoner of the Danes, but in the swamp he was free, and he wrote more letters, telling
Wessex he lived, that he grew stronger and that after Easter, but before Pentecost, he
would strike the pagans.

It rained that late winter. Rain and more rain. I remember standing on the muddy parapet
of the new fort and watching the rain just falling and falling. Mail coats rusted, fabrics
rotted and food went mouldy. Our huts fell apart and we had no men skilled in making new ones.
We slid and splashed through greasy mud, our clothes were never dry, and still grey swathes of
rain marched from the west. Thatch dripped, huts flooded, the world was sullen.

We ate well enough, though as more men came to Æthelingaeg, the food became scarcer, but no
one starved and no one complained except Bishop Alewold who grimaced whenever he saw
another fish stew. There were no deer left in the swamp, all had been netted and eaten, but
at least we had fish, eels and wildfowl, while outside the swamp, in those areas the Danes had
plundered, folk starved. We practised with our weapons, fought mock battles with staves,
watched the hills, and welcomed the messengers who brought news. Burgweard, the fleet
commander, wrote from Hamtun saying that the town was garrisoned by Saxons, but that
Danish ships were off the coast.

'I don't suppose he's fighting them,' Leofric remarked glumly when he heard that
news.

'He doesn't say so,' I said.

'Doesn't want to get his nice ships dirty,' Leofric guessed. 'At least he still has the
ships.'

A letter came from a priest in distant Kent saying that Vikings from Lundene had
occupied Contwaraburg and others had settled on the Isle of Sceapig, and that the
Ealdorman had made his peace with the invaders. News came from Stith Seaxa of more Danish
raids, but also a reassurance from Arnulf, Ealdorman of Suth Seaxa, that his fyrd would
gather in the spring. He sent a gospel book to Alfred as a token of his loyalty, and for
days Alfred carried the book until the rain soaked into the pages and made the ink run.
Wiglaf, Ealdorman of Sumorsaete, appeared in early March and brought seventy men. He
claimed to have been hiding in the hills south of Barnum and Alfred ignored the rumours
which said Wiglaf had been negotiating with Guthrum. All that mattered was that the
Ealdorman had come to Æthelingaeg and Alfred gave him command of the troops that
continually rode inland to shadow the Danes and to ambush their forage parties. Not all
the news was so encouraging. Wilfrith of Hamptonscir had fled across the water to Frankia,
as had a score of other Ealdormen and thegns.

But Odda the Younger, Ealdorman of Defnascir, was still in Wessex. He sent a priest who
brought a letter reporting that the Ealdorman was holding Exanceaster. 'God he praised,'
the letter read, 'but there are no pagans in the town'.

'So where are they?' Alfred asked the priest. We knew that Svein, despite losing his ships,
had not marched to join Guthrum, which suggested he was still skulking in Defnascir.

The priest, a young man who seemed terrified of the king, shrugged, hesitated, then
stammered that Svein was close to Exanceaster.

'Close?' the king asked.

'Nearby,' the priest managed to say.

'They besiege the town?' Alfred asked.

'No, lord.'

Alfred read the letter a second time. He always had great faith in the written word and
he was trying to find some hint of the truth that had escaped him in the first reading. 'They
are not in Exanceaster,' he concluded, 'but the letter does not say where they are. Nor how
many they are. Nor what they're doing.'

'They are nearby, lord,' the priest said hopelessly. 'To the west, I think.'

'The west?'

'I think they're to the west.'

'What's to the west?' Alfred asked me.

'The high moor,' I said.

Alfred threw the letter down in disgust. 'Maybe you should go to Defnascir,' he told me,
and find out what the pagans are doing.'

'Yes, lord,' I said.

'It will be a chance to discover your wife and child,' Alfred said. There was a sting
there. As the winter rains fell the priests hissed their poison into Alfred's ears and he was
willing enough to hear their message, which was that the Saxons would only defeat the Danes
if God willed it. And God, the priests said, wanted us to be virtuous. And Iseult was a
pagan, as was I, and she and I were not married, while I had a wife, and so the accusation
was whispered about the swamp that it was Iseult who stood between Alfred and victory. No
one said it openly, not then, yet Iseult sensed it. Hild was her protector in those days,
because Hild was a nun, a Christian, and a victim of the Danes, but many thought Iseult was
corrupting Hild. I pretended to be deaf to the whispers until Alfred's daughter told me
of them.

Æthelflaed was almost seven and her father's favourite child. Ælswith was fonder of
Edward, and in those wet winter days she worried about her son's health and the health of her
newborn child, which gave Æthelflaed a deal of freedom. She would stay at her father's side
much of the time, but she also wandered about Æthelingaeg where she was spoiled by soldiers
and villagers. She was a bright ripple of sunlight in those rain-sodden days. She had
golden hair, a sweet face, blue eyes and no fear. One day I found her at the southern fort,
watching a dozen Danes who had come to watch us. I told her to go back to Æthelingaeg and she
pretended to obey me, but an hour later, when the Danes had gone, I found her hiding in one
of the turf-roofed shelters behind the wall.

'I hoped the Danes would come,' she told me.

'So they could take you away?'

'So I could watch you kill them.'

It was one of the rare days when it was not raining. There was sunshine on the green hills
and I sat on the wall, took Serpent-Breath from her fleece-lined scabbard and began
sharpening her two edges with a whetstone. Æthelflaed insisted on trying the whetstone and
she laid the long blade on her lap and frowned in concentration as she drew the stone down the
sword. 'How many Danes have you killed?' she asked.

'Enough.'

'Mama says you don't love Jesus.'

'We all love Jesus,' I said evasively.

'If you loved Jesus,' she said seriously, 'then you could kill more Danes. What's this?'
She had found the deep nick in one of Serpent-Breath's edges.

'It's where she hit another sword,' I said. It had happened at Cippanhamm during my
fight with Steapa and his huge sword had bitten deep into Serpent-Breath.

'I'll make her better,' she said, and worked obsessively with the whetstone, trying to
smooth the nick's edges. 'Mama says Iseult is an aglaecwif.' She stumbled over the word, then
grinned in triumph because she had managed to say it. I said nothing. An aglaecwif was a
fiend, a monster. 'The bishop says it too,' Æthelflaed said earnestly. 'I don't like the
bishop.'

'You don't?'

'He dribbles.' She tried to demonstrate and managed to spit onto Serpent-Breath. She
rubbed the blade. 'Is Iseult an aglaecwif?'