“Strange,” he said thoughtfully. He was looking at Guthrum’s envoys who had so narrowly escaped losing their heads. “You don’t mind escorting them?”
“No.”
“It might be no bad thing if they live,” he said quietly. “Why give Guthrum cause to attack us?”
“He won’t,” I said confidently, “whether you kill them or not.”
“Probably not,” he agreed, “but we agreed that if the priest won, then they would all live, so let them live. And you’re sure you don’t mind escorting them away?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Then come back here,” Erik said warmly, “we need you.”
“You need Ragnar,” I corrected him.
“True,” he confessed, and smiled. “See those men safe out of the city, then come back.”
“I have a wife and children to fetch first,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, and smiled again. “You are fortunate in that. But you will come back?”
“Bjorn the Dead told me so,” I said, carefully evading his question.
“So he did,” Erik said. He embraced me. “We need you,” he said, “and together we can take this whole island.”
We left, riding through the city streets, out through the western gate that was known as Ludd’s Gate, and then down to the ford across the River Fleot. Sihtric was bent over his saddle’s pommel, still suffering from the kicking he had received from Sigefrid. I looked behind as we left the ford, half expecting that Sigefrid would have countermanded his brother’s decision and sent men to pursue us, but none appeared. We spurred through the marshy ground and then up the slight slope to the Saxon town.
I did not stay on the road that led westward, but instead turned onto the wharves where a dozen ships were moored. These were river boats that traded with Wessex and Mercia. Few shipmasters cared to shoot the dangerous gap in the ruined bridge that the Romans had thrown across the Temes, so these ships were smaller, manned by oarsmen, and all of them had paid dues to me at Coccham. They all knew me, because they did business with me on every trip.
We forced our way through heaps of merchandise, past open fires and through the gangs of slaves loading or unloading cargoes. Only one ship was ready to make a voyage. She was named the Swan and I knew her well. She had a Saxon crew, and she was nearly ready to leave because her oarsmen were standing on the wharf while the shipmaster, a man called Osric, finished his business with the merchant whose goods he was carrying. “You’re taking us too,” I told him.
We left most of the horses behind, though I insisted that room was found for Smoca, and Finan wanted to keep his stallion too, and so the beasts were coaxed into the Swan’s open hold where they stood shivering. Then we left. The tide was flooding, the oars bit, and we glided upriver. “Where am I taking you, lord?” Osric the shipmaster asked me.
“To Coccham,” I said.
And back to Alfred.
The river was wide, gray, and sullen. It flowed strongly, fed by the winter rains against which the incoming tide gave less and less resistance. The Swan made hard work of the early rowing as the ten oarsmen fought the current and I caught Finan’s eye and we exchanged smiles. He was remembering, as I was, our long months at the oars of a slave-rowed trading ship. We had suffered, bled, and shivered, and we had thought that only death could release us from that fate, but now other men rowed us as the Swan fought around the great swooping bends of the Temes that were softened by the wide floods that stretched into the water meadows.
I sat on the small platform built in the ship’s blunt bow and Father Pyrlig joined me there. I had given him my cloak, which he clutched tight around him. He had found some bread and cheese, which did not surprise me because I have never known a man eat so much. “How did you know I’d beat Sigefrid?” he asked.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “In fact I was hoping he’d beat you, and that there would be one less Christian.”
He smiled at that, then gazed at the waterfowl on the flood water. “I knew I had two or three strokes only,” he said, “before he realized I knew what I was doing. Then he’d have cut the flesh off my bones.”
“He would,” I agreed, “but I reckoned you had those three strokes and they’d prove enough.”
“Thank you for that, Uhtred,” he said, then broke off a lump of cheese and gave it to me. “How are you these days?”
“Bored.”
“I hear you’re married?”
“I’m not bored with her,” I said hurriedly.
“Good for you! Me, now? I can’t stand my wife. Dear God, what a tongue that viper has. She can split a sheet of slate just by talking to it! You’ve not met my wife, have you?”
“No.”
“Sometimes I curse God for taking Adam’s rib and making Eve, but then I see some young girl and my heart leaps and I think God knew what he was doing after all.”
I smiled. “I thought Christian priests were supposed to set an example?”
“And what’s wrong with admiring God’s creations?” Pyrlig asked indignantly. “Especially a young one with plump round tits and a fine fat rump? It would be sinful of me to ignore such signs of his grace.” He grinned, then looked anxious. “I heard you were taken captive?”
“I was.”
“I prayed for you.”
“Thank you for that,” I said, and meant it. I did not worship the Christian god, but like Erik I feared he had some power, so prayers to him were not wasted.
“But I hear it was Alfred who had you released?” Pyrlig asked.
I paused. As ever I hated to acknowledge any debt to Alfred, but I grudgingly conceded that he had helped. “He sent the men who freed me,” I said, “yes.”
“And you reward him, Lord Uhtred, by naming yourself King of Mercia?”
“You heard that?” I asked cautiously.
“Of course I heard it! That great oaf of a Norseman bawled it just five paces from my ear. Are you King of Mercia?”
“No,” I said, resisting the urge to add “not yet.”
“I didn’t think you were,” Pyrlig said mildly. “I’d have heard about that, wouldn’t I? And I don’t think you will be, not unless Alfred wants it.”
“Alfred can piss down his own throat for all I care,” I said.
“And of course I should tell him what I heard,” Pyrlig said.
“Yes,” I said bitterly, “you should.”
I leaned against the curving timber of the ship’s stem and stared at the backs of the oarsmen. I was also watching for any sign of a pursuing ship, half expecting to see some fast warship swept along by banks of long oars, but no mast showed above the river’s long bends, which suggested Erik had successfully persuaded his brother against taking an instant revenge for the humiliation Pyrlig had given him. “So whose idea is it,” Pyrlig asked, “that you should be king in Mercia?” He waited for me to answer, but I said nothing. “It’s Sigefrid, isn’t it?” he demanded. “Sigefrid’s crazy idea.”
“Crazy?” I asked innocently.
“The man’s no fool,” Pyrlig said, “and his brother certainly isn’t. They know Æthelstan’s getting old in East Anglia, and they ask who’ll be king after him? And there’s no king in Mercia. But he can’t just take Mercia, can he? The Mercian Saxons will fight him and Alfred will come to their aid, and the Thurgilson brothers will find themselves facing a fury of Saxons! So Sigefrid has this idea to rally men and take East Anglia first, then Mercia, and then Wessex! And to do all that he really needs Earl Ragnar to bring men from Northumbria.”
I was appalled that Pyrlig, a friend of Alfred’s, should know all that Sigefrid, Erik, and Haesten planned, but I showed no reaction. “Ragnar won’t fight,” I said, trying to end the conversation.
“Unless you ask him,” Pyrlig said sharply. I just shrugged. “But what can Sigefrid offer you?” Pyrlig asked, and, when I did not respond again, provided the answer himself. “Mercia.”
I smiled condescendingly. “It all sounds very complica
ted.”
“Sigefrid and Haesten,” Pyrlig said, ignoring my flippant comment, “have ambitions to be kings. But there are only four kingdoms here! They can’t take Northumbria because Ragnar won’t let them. They can’t take Mercia because Alfred won’t let them. But Æthelstan’s getting old, so they could take East Anglia. And why not finish the job? Take Wessex? Sigefrid says he’ll put that drunken nephew of Alfred’s on the throne, and that’ll help calm the Saxons for a few months until Sigefrid murders him, and by then Haesten will be King of East Anglia and someone, you perhaps, King of Mercia. Doubtless they’ll turn on you then and divide Mercia between them. That’s the idea, Lord Uhtred, and it’s not a bad one! But who’d follow those two brigands?”
“No one,” I lied.
“Unless they were convinced that the Fates were on their side,” Pyrlig said almost casually, then looked at me. “Did you meet the dead man?” he asked innocently, and I was so astonished by the question that I could not answer. I just stared into his round, battered face. “Bjorn, he’s called,” the Welshman said, putting another lump of cheese into his mouth.
“The dead don’t lie,” I blurted out.
“The living do! By God, they do! Even I lie, Lord Uhtred.” He grinned at me mischievously. “I sent a message to my wife and said she’d hate being in East Anglia!” He laughed. Alfred had asked Pyrlig to go to East Anglia because he was a priest and because he spoke Danish, and his task there had been to educate Guthrum in Christian ways. “In fact she’d love it there!” Pyrlig went on. “It’s warmer than home and there are no hills to speak of. Flat and wet, that’s East Anglia, and without a proper hill anywhere! And my wife’s never been fond of hills, which is why I probably found God. I used to live on hilltops just to keep away from her, and you’re closer to God on a hilltop. Bjorn isn’t dead.”
He had said the last three words with a sudden brutality, and I answered him just as harshly. “I saw him.”
“You saw a man come from a grave, that’s what you saw.”
“I saw him!” I insisted.
“Of course you did! And you never thought to question what you saw, did you?” The Welshman asked the question harshly. “Bjorn had been put in that grave just before you came! They piled earth on him and he breathed through a reed.”
I remembered Bjorn spitting something out of his mouth as he staggered upright. Not the harp string, but something else. I had thought it a lump of earth, but in truth it had been paler. I had not thought about it at the time, but now I understood that the resurrection had all been a trick and I sat on the foredeck of the Swan and felt the last remnants of my dream crumbling. I would not be king. “How do you know all this?” I asked bitterly.
“King Æthelstan’s no fool. He has his spies.” Pyrlig put a hand on my arm. “Was he very convincing?”
“Very,” I said, still bitter.
“He’s one of Haesten’s men, and if we ever catch him he’ll go properly to hell. So what did he tell you?”
“That I would be king in Mercia,” I said softly. I was to be king of Saxon and Dane, enemy of the Welsh, king between the rivers and lord of all I ruled. “I believed him,” I said ruefully.
“But how could you be King of Mercia?” Pyrlig asked, “unless Alfred made you king?”
“Alfred?”
“You gave him your oath, did you not?”
I was ashamed to tell the truth, but had no choice. “Yes,” I admitted.
“Which is why I must tell him,” Pyrlig said sternly, “because a man breaking an oath is a serious matter, Lord Uhtred.”
“It is,” I agreed.
“And Alfred will have the right to kill you when I tell him.”
I shrugged.
“Better you keep the oath,” Pyrlig said, “than be fooled by men who make a corpse from a living man. The Fates are not on your side, Lord Uhtred. Trust me.”
I looked at him and saw the sorrow in his eyes. He liked me, yet he was telling me I had been fooled, and he was right, and the dream was collapsing around me. “What choice do I have?” I asked him bitterly. “You know I went to Lundene to join them, and you must tell Alfred that, and he will never trust me again.”
“I doubt he trusts you now,” Pyrlig said cheerfully. “He’s a wise man, Alfred. But he knows you, Uhtred, he knows you are a warrior, and he needs warriors.” He paused to pull out the wooden cross that hung about his neck. “Swear on it,” he said.
“Swear what?”
“That you will keep your oath to him! Do that and I will keep silent. Do that and I will deny what happened. Do that and I will protect you.”
I hesitated.
“If you break your oath to Alfred,” Pyrlig said, “then you are my enemy and I’ll be forced to kill you.”
“You think you could?” I asked.
He grinned his mischievous grin. “Ah, you like me, lord, even though I am a Welshman and a priest, and you’d be reluctant to kill me, and I’d have three strokes before you woke up to your danger, so yes, lord, I would kill you.”
I put my right hand on the cross. “I swear it,” I said.
And I was still Alfred’s man.
THREE
We reached Coccham that evening and I watched Gisela, who had as little love for Christianity as I did, warm to Father Pyrlig. He flirted with her outrageously, complimented her extravagantly, and played with our children. We had two then, and we had been lucky, for both babies had lived, as had their mother. Uhtred was the oldest. My son. He was four years old with hair as golden-colored as mine and a strong little face with a pug nose, blue eyes, and a stubborn chin. I loved him then. My daughter Stiorra was two years old. She had a strange name and at first I had not liked it, but Gisela had pleaded with me and I could refuse her almost nothing, and certainly not the naming of a daughter. Stiorra simply meant “star,” and Gisela swore that she and I had met under a lucky star and that our daughter had been born under the same star. I had got used to the name by now and loved it as I loved the child, who had her mother’s dark hair and long face and sudden mischievous smile. “Stiorra, Stiorra!” I would say as I tickled her, or let her play with my arm rings. Stiorra, so beautiful.
I played with her on the night before Gisela and I left for Wintanceaster. It was spring and the Temes had subsided so that the river meadows showed again and the world was hazed with green as the leaves budded. The first lambs wobbled in fields bright with cowslips, and the blackbirds filled the sky with rippling song. Salmon had returned to the river and our woven willow traps provided good eating. The pear trees in Coccham were thick with buds, and just as thick with bullfinches, which had to be scared away by small boys so that we would have fruit in the summertime. It was a good time of year, a time when the world stirred, and a time when we had been summoned to Alfred’s capital for the wedding of his daughter, Æthelflaed, to my cousin, Æthelred. And that night, as I pretended my knee was a horse and that Stiorra was the horse’s rider, I thought about my promise to provide Æthelred with his wedding gift. The gift of a city. Lundene.
Gisela was spinning wool. She had shrugged when I had told her she was not to be Queen of Mercia, and she had nodded gravely when I said I would keep my oath with Alfred. She accepted fate more readily than I did. Fate and that fortunate star, she said, had brought us together despite all that the world had done to keep us apart. “If you keep your oath to Alfred,” she said suddenly, interrupting my play with Stiorra, “then you must capture Lundene from Sigefrid?”
“Yes,” I said, marveling as I often did that her thoughts and mine were so often the same.
“Can you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. Sigefrid and Erik were still in the old city, their men guarding the Roman walls that they had repaired with timber. No ship could now come up the Temes without paying the brothers their toll, and that toll was huge, so that the river traffic had stopped, as merchants sought other ways to bring goods to Wessex. King Guthrum of East Anglia had threatened Sigefrid and Erik with wa
r, but his threat had proved empty. Guthrum did not want war, he just wanted to persuade Alfred that he was doing his best to keep the peace treaty, so if Sigefrid was to be removed, then it would be the West Saxons who did the work, and I who would be responsible for leading them.
I had made my plans. I had written to the king and he, in turn, had written to the ealdormen of the shires, and I had been promised four hundred trained warriors along with the fyrd of Berrocscire. The fyrd was an army of farmers, foresters, and laborers, and though it would be numerous it would also be untrained. The four hundred trained men would be the ones I relied on, and spies said Sigefrid now had at least six hundred in the old city. Those same spies said that Haesten had gone back to his camp at Beamfleot, but that was not far from Lundene and he would hurry to reinforce his allies, as would those Danes of East Anglia who hated Guthrum’s Christianity and wanted Sigefrid and Erik to begin their war of conquest. The enemy, I thought, would number at least a thousand, and all of them would be skilled with sword, ax, or spear. They would be war-Danes. Enemies to fear.
“The king,” Gisela said mildly, “will want to know how you plan to do it.”
“Then I shall tell him,” I said.
She gave me a dubious glance. “You will?”
“Of course,” I said, “he’s the king.”
She laid the distaff on her lap and frowned at me. “You will tell him the truth?”
“Of course not,” I said. “He may be the king, but I’m not a fool.”
She laughed, which made Stiorra echo the laugh. “I wish I could come with you to Lundene,” Gisela said wistfully.
“You can’t,” I said forcefully.
“I know,” she answered with uncharacteristic meekness, then touched a hand to her belly. “I really can’t.”
I stared at her. I stared a long time as her news settled in my mind. I stared, I smiled, and then I laughed. I threw Stiorra high into the air so that her dark hair almost touched the smoke-blackened thatch. “Your mother’s pregnant,” I told the happily squealing child.
“And it’s all your father’s fault,” Gisela added sternly.