The Pale Horseman

  “No more horses,” he thundered.

  There was silence until Harald irritably gestured at the harpist who struck a chord and began playing a melancholy tune. Someone began singing, but no one joined in and his voice trailed away. “I must look to the sentinels,” Harald said, and he threw me an inquisitive look that I took as an invitation to join him, and so I buckled on my swords and then walked with him down Ocmundtun’s long street to where three spearmen stood guard beside a wooden hut. Harald talked to them for a moment, then led me farther east, away from the light of the sentinels’ fire. A moon silvered the valley, lighting the empty road until the track vanished among trees. “I have thirty fighting men,” Harald said suddenly.

  He was telling me he was too weak to fight. “How many men does Odda have in Exanceaster?” I asked.

  “A hundred? Hundred and twenty?”

  “The fyrd should have been raised.”

  “I had no orders,” Harald said.

  “Did you seek any?”

  “Of course I did.” He was angry with me now. “I told Odda we should drive Svein away, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “Did he tell you the king ordered the fyrd raised?”

  “No.” Harald paused, staring down the moonlit road. “We heard nothing of Alfred, except that he’d been defeated and was hiding. And we heard the Danes were all across Wessex, and that more were gathering in Mercia.”

  “Odda didn’t think to attack Svein when he landed?”

  “He thought to protect himself,” Harald said, “and sent me to the Tamur.”

  The Tamur was the river that divided Wessex from Cornwalum. “The Britons are quiet?” I asked.

  “Their priests are telling them not to fight us.”

  “But priests or no priests,” I said, “they’ll cross the river if the Danes look like winning.”

  “Aren’t they winning already?” Harald asked bitterly.

  “We’re still free men,” I said.

  He nodded at that. Behind us, in the town, a dog began howling and he turned as if the noise indicated trouble, but the howling stopped with a sharp yelp. He kicked a stone in the road. “Svein frightens me,” he admitted suddenly.

  “He’s a frightening man,” I agreed.

  “He’s clever,” Harald said, “clever, strong, and savage.”

  “A Dane,” I said drily.

  “A ruthless man,” Harald went on.

  “He is,” I agreed, “and do you think that after you have fed him, supplied him with horses and given him shelter, he will leave you alone?”

  “No,” he said, “but Odda believes that.”

  Then Odda was a fool. He was nursing a wolf cub that would tear him to shreds when it was strong enough. “Why didn’t Svein march north to join Guthrum?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  But I knew. Guthrum had been in England for years now. He had tried to take Wessex before, and he had failed, but now, on the very brink of success, he had paused. Guthrum the Unlucky, he was called, and I suspected he had not changed. He was wealthy, led many men, but he was cautious. Svein, though, came from the Norsemen’s settlements in Ireland and was a very different creature. He was younger than Guthrum, less wealthy than Guthrum, and led fewer men, but he was undoubtedly the better warrior. Now, bereft of his ships, he was weakened, but he had persuaded Odda the Younger to give him refuge and he gathered his strength so that when he did meet Guthrum he would not be a defeated leader in need of help, but a spear Dane of power. Svein, I thought, was a far more dangerous man than Guthrum, and Odda the Younger was only making him more dangerous.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “we must start raising the fyrd. Those are the king’s orders.”

  Harald nodded. I could not see his face in the darkness, but I sensed he was not happy, yet he was a sensible man and must have known that Svein had to be driven out of the shire. “I shall send the messages,” he said, “but Odda might stop the fyrd assembling. He’s made his truce with Svein and he won’t want me breaking it. Folk will obey him before they obey me.”

  “And what of his father?” I asked. “Will they obey him?”

  “They will,” he said, “but he’s a sick man. You saw that. It’s a miracle he lives at all.”

  “Maybe because my wife nurses him?”

  “Yes,” he said, and fell silent. There was something odd in the air now, something unexpressed, a discomfort. “Your wife nurses him well,” he finished awkwardly.

  “He’s her godfather,” I said.

  “So he is.”

  “It is good to see her,” I said, not because I meant it, but because it was the proper thing to say and I could think of nothing else. “And it will be good to see my son,” I added with more warmth.

  “Your son,” Harald said flatly.

  “He’s here, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Harald flinched. He turned away to look at the moon and I thought he would say no more, but then he summoned his courage and looked back to me. “Your son, Lord Uhtred,” he said, “is in the churchyard.”

  It took a few heartbeats for that to make sense, and then it did not make any sense at all, but left me confused. I touched my hammer amulet. “In the churchyard?”

  “It is not my place to tell you.”

  “But you will tell me,” I said, and my voice sounded like Steapa’s growl.

  Harald stared at the moon-touched river, silver white beneath the black trees. “Your son died,” he said. He waited for my response, but I neither moved nor spoke. “He choked to death.”

  “Choked?”

  “A pebble,” Harald said. “He was just a baby. He must have picked the pebble up and swallowed it.”

  “A pebble?” I asked.

  “A woman was with him, but…” Harald’s voice trailed away. “She tried to save him, but she could do nothing. He died.”

  “On Saint Vincent’s Day,” I said.

  “You knew?”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t know.” But Saint Vincent’s Day had been the day when Iseult drew Alfred’s son, the Ætheling Edward, through the earth. And somewhere, Iseult had told me, a child must die so that the king’s heir, the Ætheling, could live.

  And it had been my child. Uhtred the Younger. Whom I had hardly known. Edward had been given breath and Uhtred had twitched and fought and gasped and died.

  “I’m sorry,” Harald said. “It was not my place to tell you, but you needed to know before you saw Mildrith again.”

  “She hates me,” I said bleakly.

  “Yes,” he said, “she does.” He paused. “I thought she would go mad with grief, but God has preserved her. She would like—”

  “Like what?”

  “To join the sisters at Cridianton. When the Danes leave. They have a nunnery there, a small house.”

  I did not care what Mildrith did. “And my son is buried here?”

  “Under the yew tree”—he turned and pointed—“beside the church.”

  So let him stay there, I thought. Let him rest in his short grave to wait the chaos of the world’s ending.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “we raise the fyrd.”

  Because there was a kingdom to save.

  Priests were summoned to Harald’s hall and the priests wrote the summons for the fyrd. Most thegns could not read, and many of their priests would probably struggle to decipher the few words, but the messengers would tell them what the parchments said. They were to arm their men and bring them to Ocmundtun, and the wax seal on the summons was the authority for those orders. The seal showed Odda the Elder’s badge of a stag. “It will take a week,” Harald warned me, “for most of the fyrd to reach here, and the ealdorman will try to stop it happening at all.”

  “What will he do?”

  “Tell the thegns to ignore it, I suppose.”

  “And Svein? What will he do?”

  “Try to kill us.”

  “And he has eight hundred men who can be here tomorrow,” I said.

  ?
??And I have thirty men,” Harald said bleakly.

  “But we do have a fortress,” I said, pointing to the limestone ridge with its palisade.

  I did not doubt that the Danes would come. By summoning the fyrd we threatened their safety, and Svein was not a man who would take a threat lightly, and so, while the messages were carried north and south, the townsfolk were told to take their valuables up to the fort beside the river. Some men were set to strengthening the palisade. Others took livestock up onto the moor so the beasts could not be taken by the Danes. Steapa went to every nearby settlement and demanded that men of fighting age go to Ocmundtun with any weapon they possessed, so that by that afternoon the fort was manned by over eighty men. Few were warriors, most had no weapons other than an ax, but from the foot of the hill they looked formidable enough. Women carried food and water to the fort, and most of the town reckoned to sleep up there, despite the rain, for fear that the Danes would come in the night.

  Odda the Elder refused to go to the fort. He was too sick, he said, and too feeble, and if he was supposed to die then he would die in Harald’s hall. Harald and I tried to persuade him, but he would not listen. “Mildrith can go,” he said.

  “No,” she said. She sat by Odda’s bed, her hands clutched tight under the sleeves of her gray robe. She stared at me, challenge in her eyes, daring me to give her an order to abandon Odda and go to the fortress.

  “I am sorry,” I said to her.

  “Sorry?”

  “About our son.”

  “You were not a father to him,” she accused me. Her eyes glistened. “You wanted him to be a Dane! You wanted him to be a pagan! You didn’t even care for his soul!”

  “I cared for him,” I said, but she ignored that. I had not sounded convincing, even to myself.

  “His soul is safe,” Harald said gently. “He is in the Lord Jesus’s arms. He is happy.”

  Mildrith looked at him and I saw how Harald’s words had comforted her, though she still began crying. She caressed her wooden cross. Then Odda the Elder reached out and patted her arm. “If the Danes come, lord,” I said to him, “I shall send men for you.” I turned then and went from the sickroom. I could not cope with Mildrith crying or with the thought of a dead son. Such things are difficult, much more difficult than making war, and so I buckled on my swords, picked up my shield, and put on my splendid wolf-crested helmet so that, when Harald came from Odda’s chamber, he checked to see me standing like a warlord by his hearth. “If we make a big fire at the eastern end of town,” I said, “we’ll see the Danes come. It will give us time to carry Lord Odda to the fort.”

  “Yes.” He looked up at the great rafters of his hall, and perhaps he was thinking that he would never see it thus again, for the Danes would come and the hall would burn. He made the sign of the cross.

  “Fate is inexorable,” I told him. What else was there to say? The Danes might come, the hall might burn, but they were small things in the balance of a kingdom, and so I went to order the fire that would illuminate the eastern road, but the Danes did not come that night. It rained softly all through the darkness, so that in the morning the folk in the fort were wet, cold, and unhappy. Then, in the dawn, the first men of the fyrd arrived. It might take days for the farther parts of the shire to receive their summons and to arm men and despatch them to Ocmundtun, but the nearer places sent men straight away so that by late morning there were close to three hundred beneath the fort. No more than seventy of those could be called warriors, men who had proper weapons, shields, and at least a leather coat. The rest were farm laborers with hoes or sickles or axes.

  Harald sent foraging parties to find grain. It was one thing to gather a force, quite another to feed it, and none of us knew how long we would have to keep the men assembled. If the Danes did not come to us, then we would have to go to them and force them from Cridianton, and for that we would need the whole fyrd of Defnascir. Odda the Younger, I thought, would never allow that to happen.

  Nor did he. For, as the rain ended and the noontime prayers were said, Odda himself came to Ocmundtun and he did not come alone, but rode with sixty of his warriors in chain mail and as many Danes in their war glory. The sun came out as they appeared from the eastern trees and it shone on mail and on spear points, on bridle chains and stirrup irons, on polished helmets and bright shield bosses. They spread into the pastures on either side of the road and advanced on Ocmundtun in a wide line, and at its center were two standards. One, the black stag, was the banner of Defnascir, while the other was a Danish triangle and displayed the white horse.

  “There’ll be no fight,” I told Harald.

  “There won’t?”

  “Not enough of them. Svein can’t afford to lose men, so he’s come to talk.”

  “I don’t want to meet them here.” He gestured at the fort. “We should be in the hall.”

  He ordered that the best armed men should go down to the town, and there we filled the muddy street outside the hall as Odda and the Danes came from the east. The horsemen had to break their line to enter the town, making a column instead, and the column was led by three men. Odda was in the center and he was flanked by two Danes, one of them Svein of the White Horse.

  Svein looked magnificent, a silver-white warrior. He rode a white horse, wore a white woolen cloak, and his mail and boar-snouted helmet had been scrubbed with sand until they glowed silver in the watery sunlight. His shield bore a silvered boss around which a white horse had been painted. The leather of his bridle, saddle, and scabbard had been bleached pale. He saw me, but showed no recognition, just looked along the line of men barring the street and seemed to dismiss them as useless. His banner of the white horse was carried by the second horseman who had the same darkened face as his master, a face hammered by sun and snow, ice and wind.

  “Harald.” Odda the Younger had ridden ahead of the two Danes. He was sleek as ever, gleaming in mail, and with a black cloak draping his horse’s rump. He smiled as though he welcomed the meeting. “You have summoned the fyrd. Why?”

  “Because the king commanded it,” Harald said.

  Odda still smiled. He glanced at me, appeared not to notice I was present, then looked to the hall door where Steapa had just appeared. The big man had been talking with Odda the Elder, and now he stared at Odda the Younger with astonishment. “Steapa!” Odda the Younger said. “Loyal Steapa! How good to see you!”

  “You too, lord.”

  “My faithful Steapa,” Odda said, plainly pleased to be reunited with his erstwhile bodyguard. “Come here!” he commanded, and Steapa pushed past us and knelt in the mud by Odda’s horse and reverently kissed his master’s boot. “Stand,” Odda said, “stand. With you beside me, Steapa, who can hurt us?”

  “No one, lord.”

  “No one,” Odda repeated, then smiled at Harald. “You said the king ordered the fyrd summoned? There is a king in Wessex?”

  “There is a king in Wessex,” Harald said firmly.

  “There is a king skulking in the marshes!” Odda said, loudly enough for all Harald’s men to hear. “He is the king of frogs, perhaps? A monarch of eels? What kind of king is that?”

  I answered for Harald, only I answered in Danish. “A king who ordered me to burn Svein’s boats. Which I did. All but one, which I kept and still have.”

  Svein took off his boar-snouted helmet and looked at me and again there was no recognition. His gaze was like that of the great serpent of death that lies at the foot of Yggdrasil. “I burned the White Horse,” I told him, “and warmed my hands on its flames.” Svein spat for answer. “And the man beside you”—I spoke to Odda now, using English—“is the man who burned your church at Cynuit, the man who killed the monks. The man who is cursed in heaven, in hell, and in this world, yet now he is your ally?”

  “Does that goat turd speak for you?” Odda demanded of Harald.

  “These men speak for me,” Harald said, indicating the warriors behind him.

  “But by what right do you raise the
fyrd?” Odda asked. “I am an ealdorman!”

  “And who made you ealdorman?” Harald asked. He paused, but Odda gave no answer. “The king of frogs?” Harald asked. “The monarch of eels? If Alfred has no authority, then you have lost yours with his.”

  Odda was plainly surprised by Harald’s defiance, and he was probably irritated by it, but he gave no sign of annoyance. He just went on smiling. “I do believe,” he said to Harald, “that you have misunderstood what happens in Defnascir.”

  “Then explain to me,” Harald said.

  “I shall,” Odda said, “but we shall talk with ale and food.” He looked up at the sky. The brief sun was gone behind cloud and a chill wind was gusting the thatch of the street. “And we should talk under a roof,” Odda suggested, “before it rains again.”

  There were matters to be agreed first, though that was done soon enough. The Danish horsemen would withdraw to the eastern end of the town while Harald’s men would retreat to the fort. Each side could take ten men into the hall, and all of those men were to leave their weapons heaped in the street where they were to be guarded by six Danes and as many Saxons.

  Harald’s servants brought ale, bread, and cheese. There was no meat offered, for it was the season of Lent. Benches were placed on either side of the hearth. Svein crossed to our side of the fire as the benches were brought and at long last deigned to recognize me. “It was really you who burned the ships?” he asked.

  “Including yours.”

  “The White Horse took a year and a day to build,” he said, “and she was made of trees from which we’d hung Odin’s sacrifices. She was a good ship.”

  “She’s all ash on the seashore now,” I said.

  “Then one day I shall repay you,” he retorted, and though he spoke mildly, there was a world of threat in his voice. “And you were wrong,” he added.

  “Wrong?” I asked. “Wrong to burn your ships?”

  “There was no altar of gold at Cynuit.”

  “Where you burned the monks,” I said.

  “I burned them alive,” he agreed, “and warmed my hands on their flames.” He smiled at that memory. “You could join me again?” he suggested. “I shall forgive you burning my ship and you and I can fight side by side once more? I need good men. I pay well.”