‘To you?’
‘So I can give them gold,’ I explained. ‘Go,’ I told him, then looked at my son who was watching the retreating Danes. ‘The art of war,’ I told him, ‘is to make the enemy do your bidding.’
‘Yes, Father,’ he said obediently. He had been distressed by Frigg’s frantic and silent misery, though by now I supposed Æthelflaed would have calmed the poor woman. I had ruined little Sigril’s hair, but it would grow again, and I had given her a dripping honeycomb as consolation.
So, for the price of one piglet and a small girl’s hair, we had cleared the Danes away from Gleawecestre, and, as soon as they were gone, I took a hundred men to where their boats were tethered in the river. Some had been hauled onto land, but most were tied to the Sæfern’s bank, and we burned them all except for one smaller craft. One by one the ships caught the fire and the flames leaped up the hemp ropes and the high masts crashed down in blasts of sparks and smoke, and the Danes saw it all. I might have told Geirmund to go all the way to the high ground, but I knew he would have men watching us and they saw their fleet turned to ash that turned the river grey as it floated seawards. Boat after boat burned, their dragon prows belching flame, their timbers cracking and their hulls hissing as the ships sank. I kept the one ship afloat and took Osferth aside. ‘That ship’s yours,’ I said.
‘Mine?’
‘Take a dozen men,’ I said, ‘and row it downriver. Then up the Afen. Take Rædwulf.’ Rædwulf was one of my older men, slow and steady, who had been born and raised in Wiltunscir and knew the rivers there. ‘The Afen will take you deep into Wessex,’ I went on, ‘and I want you there fast!’ That was why I had kept the one boat unburned; the journey would be far faster by water than by land.
‘You want me to go to King Edward,’ Osferth said.
‘I want you to put on your heaviest boots and kick his arse hard! Tell him to get his army north of the Temes, but he’s to look for Æthelred coming from the east. Ideally they should join up. Then they’re to march towards Tameworþig. I can’t tell you where we’ll be, or where Cnut will be, but I’m trying to lure him north onto his own land.’
‘Tameworþig?’ Osferth asked.
‘I’ll start with Tameworþig and work my way north and east, and he’ll come for me. He’ll come fast, and he’s going to outnumber me by twenty or thirty to one, so I need Edward and Æthelred.’
Osferth frowned. ‘So why not stay in Gleawecestre, lord?’ he asked.
‘Because Cnut can put five hundred men here to keep us caged and do whatever he wants while we scratch our backsides. I can’t let him trap me in a burh. He has to pursue me. I’m leading him in a dance, and you have to bring Edward and Æthelred to join it.’
‘I understand, lord,’ he said. He turned to look at the burning boats and at the great swathe of smoke darkening the sky above the river. Two swans went past, going southwards, and I took them for a good omen. ‘Lord?’ Osferth asked.
‘Yes?’
‘The boy,’ Osferth sounded embarrassed.
‘Cnut’s son?’
‘No, Ingulfrid’s son. What will you do with him?’
‘Do? I’d like to cut his miserable little throat, but I’ll settle for selling him back to his father.’
‘Promise me you won’t hurt him, lord, or sell him to slavery.’
‘Promise you?’
He looked defiant. ‘It’s important to me, lord. Have I ever asked you for a favour before?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you asked me to save you from being a priest, and I did.’
‘Then I’m asking a second favour of you, lord. Please let me buy the boy from you.’
I laughed. ‘You can’t afford him.’
‘I will pay you, lord, if it takes the rest of my life.’ He stared at me so earnestly. ‘I swear it, lord,’ he said, ‘on the blood of our Saviour.’
‘You’ll pay me,’ I said, ‘in gold?’
‘If it takes my whole life, lord, I will pay you.’
I pretended to think about the offer, then shook my head. ‘He’s not for sale,’ I said, ‘except to his father. But I will give him to you.’
Osferth gazed at me. He was not sure he had heard correctly. ‘Give him to me?’ he asked faintly.
‘You bring me Edward’s army,’ I said, ‘and I’ll give the boy to you.’
‘Give?’ he asked a second time.
‘I swear on Thor’s hammer that I will give you the boy if you bring me Edward’s army.’
‘Truly, lord?’ He looked pleased.
‘Get your skinny arse into that boat and go,’ I said, ‘and yes. But only if you bring me Edward and Æthelred. Or just Edward. And if you don’t bring them,’ I went on, ‘the boy’s yours anyway.’
‘He is?’
‘Because I’ll be dead. Now go.’
The ships burned into the night. Geirmund would have seen the western sky aglow and he would know that everything had changed. His messengers would be riding eastwards to Cnut, telling him that his fleet was cinders and his daughter dead, and that Uhtred of Bebbanburg was loose in the west.
Which meant that the dance of death was about to begin.
And next morning, when the sky was still smeared with the smoke of the burning, we rode north.
Two hundred and sixty-nine warriors rode from Gleawecestre.
And one woman warrior. Æthelflaed insisted she would accompany us, and when Æthelflaed insisted then not all the gods of Asgard could change her mind. I tried. I might as well have attempted to turn back a tempest by farting into its face.
We took Frigg too, along with her son, her ragged-haired daughter and her servants. And we took a score of boys whose job was to look after the spare horses. One of those boys was Æthelstan, King Edward’s eldest son though not his heir. I had insisted on leaving him behind under the care of Merewalh and Bishop Wulfheard, safe behind Gleawecestre’s Roman walls, but fifteen miles up the road I saw him galloping a grey horse through a meadow where he was racing another boy. ‘You!’ I bellowed, and he slewed the stallion around and kicked it towards me.
‘Lord?’ he asked innocently.
‘I ordered you to stay in Gleawecestre,’ I snarled.
‘And so I did, lord,’ he said respectfully. ‘I always obey you.’
‘I should beat you till you bleed, you foul little liar.’
‘But you didn’t say how long I should stay, lord,’ he said reprovingly, ‘so I stayed a few minutes and then followed you. But I did obey you. I did stay.’
‘And what will your father say when you die?’ I demanded. ‘Tell me that, you excrescence.’
He pretended to think about the question, then looked at me with his most innocent expression. ‘He’ll probably thank you, lord. Bastards are a nuisance.’
Æthelflaed laughed and I had to stop myself from laughing too. ‘You’re a hideous nuisance,’ I told him. ‘Now get out of my sight before I break your skull.’
‘Yes, lord,’ he said, grinning, ‘and thank you, lord.’ He turned his horse and rode back to his friends.
Æthelflaed smiled. ‘He has spirit.’
‘A spirit that will get him killed,’ I said, ‘but it probably doesn’t matter. We’re all doomed.’
‘We are?’
‘Two hundred and sixty-nine men,’ I said, ‘and one woman, while Cnut has between three and four thousand men. What do you think?’
‘I think no one lives for ever,’ she said.
And for some reason I thought of Iseult then, of Iseult the Shadow Queen, born into darkness and given the gift of prophecy, or so she had said, and she had also said Alfred would give me power and I would take back my northern home and my woman would be a woman of gold and I would lead armies that would crush the earth with their size and power. Two hundred and sixty-nine men. I laughed.
‘You’re laughing because I’m going to die?’ Æthelflaed asked.
‘Because almost none of the prophecies have come true,’ I said.
‘Wh
at prophecies?’ she asked.
‘I was promised that your father would give me power, that I would take back Bebbanburg, that I would lead armies to darken the land, and that seven kings would die. All false.’
‘My father gave you power.’
‘He gave it,’ I agreed, ‘and he took it away. He lent it to me. I was a dog and he held the leash.’
‘And you will take back Bebbanburg,’ she said.
‘I tried, I failed.’
‘And you will try again,’ she said confidently.
‘If I live.’
‘If you live,’ she said, ‘and you will.’
‘And the seven kings?’
‘We’ll know who they are,’ she said, ‘when they die.’
The men who had deserted me at Fagranforda were back now. They had served Æthelflaed ever since my departure, but one by one they came to me and pledged their loyalty once again. They were embarrassed. Sihtric stammered his explanation, which I cut short. ‘You were frightened,’ I said.
‘Frightened?’
‘That you’d go to hell.’
‘The bishop said we’d be cursed for ever, us and our children. And Ealhswith said …’ His voice trailed away.
Ealhswith had been a whore, a good one too, and Sihtric had fallen in love with her and, against my advice, married her. It turned out he was right and I was wrong because the marriage was a happy one, but part of the price Sihtric had paid was to become a Christian, and, it seemed, a Christian who feared his wife as much as he feared the fires of hell.
‘And now?’ I asked.
‘Now, lord?’
‘Are you so sure you won’t be cursed now? You’re back under my command.’
He gave a quick smile. ‘It’s the bishop who’s frightened now, lord.’
‘So he should be,’ I said. ‘The Danes would feed him his own balls to eat, then turn him inside out, and not quickly either.’
‘He gave us absolution, lord,’ he stumbled over the long word, ‘and said we wouldn’t be doomed if we followed you.’
I laughed at that, then clapped his back. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Sihtric. I need you!’
‘Lord,’ was all he could say.
I needed him. I needed every man. Above all I needed Edward of Wessex to hurry. Cnut, once he decided to change his plans, and if he decided to change his plans, would move with lightning speed. His men, all mounted, would thunder across Mercia. It would be the wild hunt with thousands of hunters, and I would be the prey.
But first I had to draw him, and so we rode north, back into Danish territory. I knew we were being followed. Geirmund Eldgrimson would have men pursuing us, and I thought of turning back to confront them, but reckoned they would simply ride away if they saw us threaten them. So let them follow. It would take two or three days for any news of our whereabouts to reach Cnut, and two or three more days for his forces to reach us, and I had no intention of staying in the same place for more than a day. Besides, I wanted Cnut to find me. What I did not want was for Cnut to catch me.
We crossed into Danish-held Mercia and we burned. We fired halls, barns and hovels. Wherever a Dane lived, we set fires. We filled the sky with smoke. We were making signals, telling the Danes where we were, but moving fast after each burning so that it must have seemed that we were everywhere. We were not opposed. The men from these steadings had been summoned to Cnut’s army, leaving the old, the young and the women behind. I did not kill, not even livestock. We gave folk minutes to leave their homes, then used their hearths to fire the thatch. Other folk saw the smoke and fled before we arrived, and we would search the ground about such abandoned homes for signs of hasty digging. We found two hoards that way, one of them a deep hole filled with heavy silver bowls and jugs that we chopped to pieces. I remember one of those bowls, big enough to hold a pig’s head, and decorated with bare-legged girls dancing. They held garlands and they were lithe, graceful and smiling, as if they danced in a forest glade for pure joy. ‘It must be Roman,’ I said to Æthelflaed. No one I knew could have made such a delicate thing.
‘It is Roman,’ she said, pointing to words incised about the rim.
I read the words aloud, stumbling over the unfamiliar syllables. ‘Moribus et forma conciliandus amor,’ I read. ‘And what does that mean?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Amor is love, I think. The priests would know.’
‘We’re blessedly short of priests,’ I said. A couple had accompanied us because most of our men were Christians and wanted priests to be with them.
She ran a finger around the bowl’s rim. ‘It’s beautiful. A pity to break it.’
We broke it anyway, hacking it to shreds with our axes. The ancient work of a craftsman, a thing of elegant beauty, was turned into hacksilver, and hacksilver was far more useful than a bowl of half-naked dancers. Hacksilver was easy to carry and it was money. The bowl yielded at least three hundred pieces, which we shared out, and then we rode on.
We slept in groves of trees, or else in abandoned halls that we would burn in the dawn. We never lacked food. The harvest had been gathered and there was grain, there were vegetables, and there was livestock. For a whole week we roamed Cnut’s land and we ate his food and we burned his halls, and no hall-burning gave me as much pleasure as destroying his great feasting-hall at Tameworþig.
We had been riding in the countryside north of that town, deep inside Cnut’s territory, but now we went south to where the rivers met and to where old King Offa had built his magnificent hall on Tameworþig’s fortified hill. Spearmen manned the wooden palisade, but they were few in number, probably all old or injured men, and they made no attempt to resist us. As we came from the north they fled across the Roman bridge that spanned the Tame and vanished southwards.
We searched the high, old hall, seeking silver or better, but we found nothing. The feasting platters were clay, the drinking horns were undecorated, and the treasures, if there had been any, were gone. Saxons lived in the town that was built just north of the hill on which the great hall stood and they told us that men had carried four wagonloads of goods eastwards just two days before. Those men had stripped the hall, leaving only the antlers and skulls, and even the food stores were almost bare. We used hacksilver to buy bread, smoked meat and salt fish from the townspeople, and that night we slept in Cnut’s hall, but I made certain there were sentries on the wall and more on the Roman bridge that led southwards.
And in the morning we put fire to Offa’s hall. Was it King Offa’s? I do not know; I only know it was age-blackened, and that Offa had built the fort there and must have had a hall inside its wall. Perhaps the hall had been rebuilt since his death, but whoever built it, it now burned. It blazed. It caught the fire with savage speed, the ancient timbers seeming to embrace their fate, and we drew back in awe as the high beams fell to erupt sparks, smoke and new bright flame. Men must have seen that burning from fifty miles away. I have never seen a hall burn so fierce or so fast. Rats fled it, birds panicked from the thatch, and the heat drove us down to the town where our horses were penned.
We had lit a signal to defy the Danes, and next morning, as the fires still burned and the smoke drifted in a cool, damp wind, I put two hundred men on the wall facing the river. Parts of the wall had burned, and much of the rest was scorched, but to anyone coming from south of the river it would look like a fiercely defended fortress. A fortress of smoke. I took the rest of my men to the bridge and there we waited.
‘You think he’ll come?’ my son asked me.
‘I think he’ll come. Today or tomorrow.’
‘And we fight him here?’
‘What would you do?’ I asked him.
He grimaced. ‘We can defend the bridge,’ he said uncertainly, ‘but he can cross the river upstream or downstream. The water’s not that deep.’
‘So would you fight him here?’
‘No.’
‘Then we won’t,’ I said. ‘I want him to think we will, but we won’t.’
‘Then where?’ he asked.
‘You tell me.’
He thought for a while. ‘You don’t want to go back north,’ he said eventually, ‘because that takes us away from King Edward.’
‘If he’s coming,’ I said.
‘And you can’t go south,’ he continued, ignoring my pessimism, ‘and going east puts Cnut between us and Edward, so we have to go west.’
‘You see?’ I said. ‘It’s easy when you think.’
‘And going west takes us towards the Welsh,’ he said.
‘So let’s hope those bastards are sleeping.’
He stared at the long green weeds stirring languidly in the river. He was frowning. ‘But why not go south?’ he asked after a while. ‘Why not try to join Edward’s army?’
‘If it’s coming,’ I said, ‘and we don’t know that.’
‘We have no hope if it isn’t,’ he said grimly, ‘so suppose that it is. Why don’t we join it?’
‘You just said we couldn’t.’
‘But if we leave now? If we travel fast?’
I had thought of doing that. We could indeed hurry southwards, going towards the West Saxon army that I hoped was coming north, but I could not be sure that Cnut had not already blocked the way, or that he would not intercept us on the road, and then I would be forced to fight a battle in a place of his choosing, not mine. So we would go west and hope the Welsh were drunk and sleeping.
The Roman bridge was made of four stone arches and it was in surprisingly good repair. In the centre, built into one of the parapets, was a wide limestone slab cut with words, pontem perpetui mansurum in saecula, and again I had no idea what it meant, though the word perpetui suggested the bridge was intended to last for ever. If so, it was untrue, because my men broke one of the two centre arches. We used massive hammers and it took most of the day, but eventually the old stones were all on the river’s bed and we bridged the gap with baulks of timber taken from the town. We used more timber to make a barrier at the bridge’s northern end, and behind that barrier we made our shield wall.
And waited.