We arrived at dusk, not long after Osferth and his crowd of families had reached the village, though it flattered Alencestre to call the place a village. It was built where two rivers and two roads met, and where the Romans had made two forts. The older fort, its earth walls now overgrown with brambles, lay on a hill south of the rivers, while the newer fort had been built where the rivers met and it was there that Osferth waited. There were a few hovels just outside the fort’s decrepit walls, and a hall, a barn, and a half-dozen cattle byres inside. The hall had belonged to a Dane who had died at Teotanheale, and his confiscated land had been granted to the church by Æthelred. ‘Bishop Wulfheard prays there will be a monastery here,’ the steward told me.
‘Another monastery? There aren’t enough?’
Alencestre must have been important to the Romans because the ruins of their buildings lay all about the fort. Now those ruins were covered in ivy and thick with nettles, though the steward had cleared one roofless house. ‘The bishop said we must make it into a church,’ he explained.
‘You’d do better to repair the fort walls,’ I said.
‘You think the Danes will come again, lord?’ he asked nervously.
‘The Danes always come again.’ I snarled that answer, partly because I was in a bad mood and partly because he was a snivelling little man who had tried to deny us his stores of food and ale, claiming they belonged to Bishop Wulfheard. I had been prepared to pay silver for whatever we took, but decided now we would just take the supplies, and the bishop could piss into the wind for all I cared.
I posted sentries on the remnants of the fort wall. The rain was at last slackening as dusk darkened the wet land. A great fire burned in the hall, and we lit another in the barn. I stayed on the ramparts, watching the floodwaters in the fading light. Floating debris had piled itself against the piers of the Roman bridge so that the water foamed there, rippling out to seethe on either side of the bridge’s stone roadway. If Eardwulf was following us, I thought, he must cross that bridge, and so I guarded it with six men and a crude barricade made from rafters torn from the cattle byres. Six men would be enough because I doubted our pursuers would come this night. They would be as tired, as wet and as cold as we were, and the night promised to be black as pitch, too dark for men to travel safely.
‘Is Æthelred really dead?’ Osferth had joined me on the rampart.
‘So Ælfwynn says.’
‘We’ve heard that rumour before.’
‘I think it’s true,’ I said. ‘But they’ll keep it a secret for as long as they can.’
‘So Eardwulf can marry Ælfwynn?’
I nodded. Ingulfrid, Osferth’s woman, had followed him, and I beckoned for her to join us. Life was so complicated, I thought. Ingulfrid was married to a cousin of mine, another Uhtred, the son of my uncle who had usurped Bebbanburg. She had chosen to stay with us when I failed to capture that fortress. Her son had been with her, but Osferth had sent the boy back to his father. I would have cut the little bastard’s throat, but I had given the gift of his life to Osferth and he had been generous.
‘Eardwulf must find us soon,’ Osferth said, ‘he can’t keep Æthelred’s body long. Not before it starts to stink.’
‘He has a week,’ I guessed.
Osferth gazed south. The light had almost gone and the hill beyond the river was nothing but a black shape in the darkness. ‘How many men will they send?’
‘All they have.’
‘How many is that?’ Ingulfrid asked.
‘Two hundred? Three hundred?’
‘And we’re how many?’
‘Forty-three,’ I said bleakly.
‘Not enough to hold the fort,’ Osferth put in.
‘We can stop them at the bridge,’ I said, ‘but as soon as the river level drops they’ll ford it upstream.’
‘So we keep going tomorrow?’
I did not answer because I had suddenly realised my own stupidity. I had thought Brice a dull-witted enemy, but I had now joined him in the ranks of fools, and granted Eardwulf all the advantage he needed. He was no fool, nor was Æthelhelm, and they must know where I was travelling. I could pretend to head for Cirrenceastre, but they would know I was riding to join Æthelflaed, and they had no need to follow me on the road to Alencestre, they only needed to take the quicker route to Ceaster, the road that followed the Welsh borderlands, and so position their forces ahead of me while I, obligingly, used the longer and slower route through the heart of Mercia. The six sentries on the bridge were guarding nothing because Eardwulf was not pursuing us, instead he would be hurrying northwards on the road to our west. His scouts would be looking for us and doubtless they would find us, and then Eardwulf would lead his men eastwards to block our path. ‘Lord?’ Osferth asked anxiously.
‘He won’t come from the south,’ I said, ‘but from there.’ I pointed.
‘From the west?’ he asked, puzzled.
I did not explain my stupidity. I could blame it on my pain, but that was a feeble excuse. I had sent Osferth, the families, Æthelstan, and his sister on this road because it kept them from the danger of any marauding Welshmen, but all I had achieved was to trap them. ‘They’ll come from the west,’ I said bitterly, ‘unless the floods slow them.’
‘They’ll slow us,’ Osferth said uncertainly, gazing into the wet darkness.
‘You should go into the hall, lord,’ Ingulfrid said to me, ‘you’re cold and wet.’
And probably defeated, I thought. Of course Eardwulf was not following me, he had no need to! He was ahead of me, and soon he would block my path and take Ælfwynn as his bride. And then I wondered if I was even on the right side of this argument, because Eardwulf, even married to Ælfwynn, would never be named Lord of Mercia. Edward would surely take the throne, and Eardwulf would be his instrument, his reeve, and perhaps Æthelflaed would approve of her brother taking Mercia’s crown, for that would bring their father’s dream closer to reality.
Alfred had dreamed of uniting the Saxons. That meant driving the Danes out of northern Mercia, from East Anglia, and, eventually, from Northumbria. Then the four kingdoms would become just one, Englaland. For years now Mercia had depended on Wessex for its survival, so why shouldn’t the King of Wessex assume the crown? Three kingdoms were better than four, and three kingdoms were more likely to become one, so was I being stubborn and foolish? Æthelflaed might not approve of Eardwulf, who had ever been her enemy, but perhaps his ennoblement was a price worth paying to bring the dream of Englaland closer?
Then I rejected the idea. Because, I thought, this was not Edward’s idea. Edward would doubtless like to be King of Mercia, but at the expense of his eldest son’s life? Did Edward want Æthelstan killed? I doubted it. This was Lord Æthelhelm’s doing, he wanted Æthelstan removed to ensure that his own grandson would become the King of Wessex and of Mercia and, if the gods of war allowed it, the King of Englaland too. And Æthelstan was as dear to me as my own son and daughter, and now I had led him to this muddy fort in the centre of Mercia, and his enemies were already farther north, cutting him off from Æthelflaed’s men, who were his only hope of survival.
‘Lord?’ Osferth said.
‘To the hall,’ I said, ‘and pray.’
Because I had been a fool.
Thunder disturbed the night. Sometime around midnight the rain, which had lessened at dusk, became torrential again and then fell for the rest of the dark hours. It was a seething, soaking and hard rain.
‘We shall have to build an ark, lord,’ Father Cuthbert spoke to me just before the dawn. I was standing at the hall door, listening to the rain beat on the thatch.
‘How did you know it was me?’ I asked him.
‘You all smell differently,’ he said. He groped with his hands and found the doorjamb. ‘And besides,’ he went on as he leaned against the pillar, ‘you were muttering.’
‘I was?’
‘Calling yourself a damned fool,’ he sounded amused, ‘which is what you usually call me.’
‘You are,’ I said.
He turned his eyeless face towards me. ‘What have I done now?’
‘Marrying Edward to his Centish girl,’ I said, ‘that was a damn fool thing to do.’
‘It kept him from sin, lord.’
‘Sin! You mean swiving a girl is a sin?’
‘No one said life is fair.’
‘Your god makes strange rules.’
He turned his face to the rain. I could just see the first faint light touching the east with a damp grey line. ‘Rain,’ he said, as if I hadn’t noticed.
‘Floods,’ I growled.
‘You see? We need an ark. Polecats.’
‘Polecats?’
‘Sheep I can understand,’ he said. ‘Noah wouldn’t have found it difficult to find a pair of sheep or a couple of cows. But how on earth did he persuade two polecats to enter the ark?’
I had to smile. ‘You think it really happened,’ I asked him, ‘your story of a flood?’
‘Oh yes, lord. It was God’s judgement on a wicked world.’
I stared into the downpour. ‘Then someone must have been very wicked to bring this rain,’ I said lightly.
‘It wasn’t you, lord,’ he said loyally.
‘For a change,’ I said, still smiling. And Father Cuthbert was right. We needed an ark. What I should have done was have Osferth take the families and all their baggage to the Temes and find a boat, then we should have followed him. The voyage to Ceaster would have taken time, a long time, but once at sea we would have been safe from pursuit. Better still would have been to keep a boat on the Sæfern, south of Gleawecestre, but since my fight with Cnut I had been too feeble to even think about such things.
‘So we just keep going now, lord?’ Cuthbert asked in a tone suggesting that the last thing he wanted was another day’s difficult travel through a rainstorm.
‘I’m not sure we can,’ I said, and a few moments later I splashed through the wet grass and climbed the low rampart to see that the fort was now almost an island. In the half-light of the grey dawn all I could see was water. The rivers had flooded and still the rain fell. I stared as the light slowly grew, then heard a mewing sound and turned to see that Father Cuthbert had followed me and was now lost, standing in ankle-deep water and casting about with the long staff he carried to guide his steps. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him. ‘You can’t see, so why come out here?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said plaintively.
I fetched him to the rampart’s weatherworn top. ‘There’s nothing to see,’ I said, ‘just floods.’
He leaned on the staff, his empty eye sockets staring north. ‘Have you ever heard of Saint Loginos?’ he asked me.
‘Never,’ I said.
‘Sometimes he’s called Longinus,’ he added as if that might spur my memory.
‘What did he do? Preach to polecats?’
‘Not so far as I know, lord, though perhaps he did. He was a blind soldier, the man who thrust his spear into the side of our lord when he hung on the cross.’
I turned on Cuthbert. ‘Why would you give a blind soldier a spear?’
‘I don’t know. It just happened.’
‘Go on,’ I said. I was bored with the stories of saints, how they hung their cloaks on sunbeams or revived the dead or turned chalk into cheese. I would believe the nonsense if I saw even one of those miracles, but I indulged Father Cuthbert. I liked him.
‘He wasn’t a Christian,’ the priest said, ‘but when he thrust the spear some of our Lord’s blood fell on his face and he could see again! He was cured! And so he became a Christian too.’
I smiled, said nothing. The rain was coming straight down, not a breath of wind.
‘Loginos was cured,’ Father Cuthbert went on, ‘but he was cursed too. He had wounded our saviour and the curse meant that he would never die!’
‘That is a curse,’ I said feelingly.
‘He still lives, lord, and every day he takes a mortal wound. Maybe you have fought him! Maybe you gave him that day’s mortal wound, and every night he lies down to die and the spear he used against our Lord lies at his side and it cures him.’
I realised he was telling me the story because he wanted to help me. I kept quiet, staring at the few hummocks of land showing above the spreading water. Cattle crowded on one such hillock. A drowned lamb had fetched up at the foot of the ramparts and the first crows were already tearing at the fleece. Father Cuthbert’s ravaged face was turned to me. I knew what he was saying, but I asked anyway. ‘What are you suggesting?’
‘The weapon that gave the wound can cure it, lord,’ he said.
‘But Loginos’s spear did not wound Loginos,’ I pointed out.
‘Loginos wounded himself when his spear pierced Christ’s side, lord. He wounded all of us. He wounded mankind.’
‘It’s a muddled story,’ I said. ‘He becomes a Christian, but he’s cursed? He dies every day and yet he lives? His spear cures him even though it didn’t wound him?’
‘Lord,’ Father Cuthbert was entreating me, ‘find the sword that wounded you. It can cure you.’
‘Ice-Spite,’ I said.
‘It must exist!’
‘Oh, she exists,’ I said. I assumed the sword had been carried from the battlefield by one of Cnut’s men. ‘But how do I find it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Cuthbert said, ‘I only know you must.’ He spoke so earnestly, and I knew his words sprang from loyalty. He was not the first person to suggest that the blade that had wounded me could cure me, and I believed it, but how did I find that one blade in all Britain? Cnut’s sword, I thought, was in the hands of an enemy, and that enemy was using it to give me pain. There were spells and incantations that would do that. It was an ancient magic, older than Cuthbert’s Christian sorcery, a magic that went back to the beginnings of time.
‘I will look for it, my friend,’ I told him. ‘Now come, you don’t need to stand in the rain.’
I took him back to the hall.
And the rain did not stop.
Nor did the enemy.
The floods trapped us. The wagons that Osferth had brought from Fagranforda could not go farther, at least not till the waters receded, nor did I want to abandon them. Everything we possessed of any value was on those wagons. Besides, even if we struggled through the floodwaters to the higher ground we could be caught in open country by the horsemen I knew were searching for us. It was better to stay in the Roman fort where, for the moment, we were safe. The flood meant that we could only be approached from the north. We could not be outflanked.
Yet to stay was to invite an enemy to find us, and once the floodwaters drained away we could be assaulted from east, west, and north, and so I sent three of my younger men eastwards. They had to ride north first, following the Roman road that was raised on a slight embankment, but even so the water rose well above their stirrups before they reached the low hills and could turn east. They were riding to find men who supported Æthelflaed. ‘Tell them Æthelred is dead,’ I told them, ‘and that Eardwulf is trying to become Lord of Mercia. And ask them to send men here.’
‘You’re starting a rebellion,’ Osferth accused me.
‘Against who?’ I challenged him.
He hesitated. ‘Æthelred?’ he finally suggested.
‘He’s dead.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘So what would you have me do?’ I asked, posing the same question with which I had challenged him in Cirrenceastre and, once again, he had no answer. He was not opposed to me, but rather, like his father, Osferth was a man who cared about the law. God, he believed, would support the right cause and Osferth suffered agonies of conscience as he tried to discover what was right and what was wrong, and in his mind the right was usually whatever cause the church supported. ‘Supposing Æthelred still lives,’ I pressed him, ‘does that give him the right to help Æthelhelm destroy Æthelstan?’
‘No,’ he admitted.
‘Or marry Ælfwynn to Eardwulf?
’
‘She’s his daughter. He can dispose of her as he wishes.’
‘And her mother has no say?’
‘Æthelred is the Lord of Mercia,’ he said, ‘and even if he wasn’t, then the husband is the head of the family.’
‘Then why are you tupping another man’s wife?’ I asked him. He looked desperately unhappy, poor man, and I wondered at the struggle he had to feel between his love for Ingulfrid and the nailed god’s disapproval. ‘And if Æthelred’s dead,’ I asked another question so he would not have to answer the first, ‘where does that leave Æthelflaed?’
He still looked miserable. Æthelflaed was his half-sister, and he was fond of her, but he was also hounded by his god’s ridiculous demands. ‘The custom,’ he said quietly, ‘is for the ruler’s widow to enter a nunnery.’
‘And you want that for her?’ I asked angrily.
He flinched at the question. ‘What else can she do?’ he demanded.
‘She could take her husband’s place,’ I said.
He stared at me. ‘She could rule Mercia?’
‘Can you think of anyone better?’
‘But women don’t rule!’
‘Æthelflaed can,’ I said.
‘But …’ he began and fell silent.
‘Who better?’ I demanded.
‘Her brother?’
‘Edward! And what if Mercia doesn’t want to be ruled by Wessex?’
‘They already are,’ he said, which was true enough though everyone pretended it was not.
‘And who’d be the better ruler?’ I demanded. ‘Your half-brother or your half-sister?’