‘And Haesten’s gone to join them?’
‘I’d think so,’ I said. We knew nothing for certain, of course, except that Haesten’s men had attacked south from Ceaster and then, mysteriously, ridden eastwards. Edward, like Æthelflaed, had responded to my very first warnings, sending men north to discover whether there was an invasion or not. Steapa was supposed to confirm or deny my first message, then ride back to Wintanceaster. Æthelflaed had ignored my orders to shelter in Cirrenceastre and instead brought her own house-warriors north. Other Mercian troops, she said, had been summoned to Gleawecestre. ‘That’s a surprise,’ I said sarcastically. Æthelred, just as he had the last time Haesten invaded Mercia, would protect his own lands and let the rest of the country fend for itself.
‘I should go back to the king,’ Steapa said.
‘What are your orders?’ I asked him. ‘To find the Danish invasion?’
‘Yes, lord.’
‘Have you found it?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Then you and your men come with me,’ I said, ‘and you,’ I pointed to Æthelflaed, ‘should go to Cirrenceastre or else join your brother.’
‘And you,’ she said, pointing back at me, ‘do not command me, so I’ll do what I wish.’ She stared at me challengingly, but I said nothing. ‘Why don’t we destroy Haesten?’ she asked.
‘Because we don’t have enough men,’ I said patiently, ‘and because we don’t know where the rest of the Danes are. You want to start a battle with Haesten and then discover three thousand mead-crazed Danes are in your rear?’
‘Then what do we do?’ she asked.
‘What I tell you to do,’ I said, and so we went eastwards, following Haesten’s hoof-prints, and it was noticeable that no more steadings had been burned and no villages sacked. That meant Haesten had been travelling fast, ignoring the chances for enrichment because, I assumed, he was under orders to join the Danish great army, wherever that was.
We hurried too, but on the second day we were close to Liccelfeld and I had business there. We rode into the small town that had no walls, but boasted a great church, two mills, a monastery and an imposing hall, which was the bishop’s house. Many of the folk had fled southwards, seeking the shelter of a burh, and our arrival caused panic. We saw folk running towards the nearest woods, assuming we were Danes.
We watered the horses in the two streams that ran through the town and I sent Osferth and Finan to buy food while Æthelflaed and I took thirty men to the town’s second largest hall, a magnificent and new building that stood at Liccelfeld’s northern edge. The widow who lived there had not fled from our arrival. Instead she waited in her hall, accompanied by a dozen servants.
Her name was Edith. She was young, she was pretty and she was hard, though she looked soft. Her face was round, her curly red hair was springy and her figure plump. She wore a gown of linen dyed gold and around her neck was a looped golden chain. ‘You’re Offa’s widow,’ I said, and she nodded without speaking. ‘Where are his dogs?’
‘I drowned them,’ she said.
‘How much did Jarl Sigurd pay your husband to lie to us?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.
I turned to Sihtric. ‘Search the place,’ I told him, ‘take all the food you need.’
‘You can’t…’ Edith began.
‘I can do what I want!’ I snarled at her. ‘Your husband sold Wessex and Mercia to the Danes.’
She was stubborn, admitting nothing, yet there was too much evident wealth in the newly built hall. She screamed at us, clawed at me when I took the gold from around her neck, and spat curses when we left. I did not leave the town straightaway, instead I went to the graveyard by the cathedral where my men dug Offa’s body from its grave. He had paid silver to the priests so that he could be buried close to the relics of Saint Chad, believing that proximity would hasten his ascent into heaven on the day of Christ’s return to earth, but I did my best to consign his filthy soul to the Christian hell. We carried his rotting body, still in its discoloured winding sheet, to the edge of town and there threw it into a stream.
Then we rode on eastwards to discover whether his treachery had doomed Wessex.
PART FOUR
Death in Winter
Eleven
The village was no more. The houses were smouldering piles of charred timbers and ash, the corpses of four hacked dogs lay in the muddy street, and the stink of roasted flesh was mingling with the sullen smoke. A woman’s body, naked and swollen, floated in a pond. Ravens were perched on her shoulders, tearing at the bloated flesh. Blood had dried black in the grooves of the flat washing-stone beside the water. A great elm tree towered above the village, but its southern side had been set alight by flames from the church roof and had burned so that the tree appeared lightning-blasted, one half in full green leaf, the other half black, shrivelled and brittle. The ruins of the church still burned and there was not one person alive to tell us the name of the place, though a dozen smears of smoke told us that this was not the only village to be reduced to charred ruin.
We had ridden eastwards, again following the tracks of Haesten’s band, then those hoof-prints had turned south to join a larger burned and beaten path. That path had been made by hundreds of horses, probably thousands, and the smoke trails in the sky suggested that the Danes were journeying south towards the valley of the Temes and the rich pickings of Wessex beyond.
‘There are corpses in the church,’ Osferth told me. His voice was calm, yet I could tell he was angry. ‘Many corpses,’ he said. ‘They must have locked them inside and burned the church around them.’
‘Like a hall-burning,’ I said, remembering Ragnar the Elder’s hall blazing in the night and the screams of the people trapped inside.
‘There are children there,’ Osferth said, sounding angrier. ‘Their bodies shrivelled to the size of babies!’
‘Their souls are with God,’ Æthelflaed tried to comfort him.
‘There’s no pity any more,’ Osferth said, looking at the sky, which was a mix of grey cloud and dark smoke.
Steapa also glanced at the sky. ‘They’re going south,’ he said. He was thinking of his orders to return to Wessex and worrying that I was keeping him in Mercia while a Danish horde threatened his homeland.
‘Or maybe to Lundene?’ Æthelflaed suggested. ‘Maybe south to the Temes, then downriver to Lundene?’ She was thinking the same thoughts as me. I remembered the city’s decayed wall, and Eohric’s scouts watching that wall. Alfred had known the importance of Lundene, which is why he had asked me to capture it, but did the Danes know? Whoever garrisoned Lundene controlled the Temes, and the Temes led deep into Mercia and Wessex. So much trade went through Lundene and so many roads led there and whoever held Lundene held the key to southern Britain. I looked southwards where the great plumes of smoke drifted. A Danish army had passed this way, probably only a day before, but was it their only army? Was another besieging Lundene? Had another already captured the city? I was tempted to ride straight for Lundene to ensure that it would be well defended, but that would mean abandoning the burning trail of the great army. Æthelflaed was watching me, waiting for an answer, but I said nothing. Six of us sat on our horses in the centre of that burned village while my men watered their horses in the pond where the swollen corpse floated. Æthelflaed, Steapa, Finan, Merewalh and Osferth were all looking to me, and I was trying to place myself in the mind of whoever commanded the Danes. Cnut? Sigurd? Eohric? We did not even know that.
‘We’ll follow these Danes,’ I finally decided, nodding towards the smoke in the southern sky.
‘I should join my lord,’ Merewalh said unhappily.
Æthelflaed smiled. ‘Let me tell you what my husband will do,’ she said, and the scorn in the word husband was as pungent as the stench from the burning church. ‘He will keep his forces in Gleawecestre,’ she went on, ‘just as he did when the Danes last invaded.’ She saw the struggle on Merewa
lh’s face. He was a good man, and like all good men he wanted to do his oath-duty, which was to be at his lord’s side, but he knew Æthelflaed spoke the truth. She straightened in her saddle. ‘My husband,’ she said, though this time without any scorn, ‘gave me permission to give orders to any of his followers that I encountered. So now I order you to stay with me.’
Merewalh knew she was lying. He looked at her for an instant, then nodded. ‘Then I shall, lady.’
‘What about the dead?’ Osferth asked, staring at the church. Æthelflaed leaned over and gently touched her half-brother’s arm. ‘The dead must bury their dead,’ she said.
Osferth knew there was no time to give the dead a Christian burial. They must be left here, but the anger was tight in him and he slid from his saddle and walked to the smoking church where small flames licked from the burning timbers. He pulled two charred lengths of wood from the ruin. One was about five feet long, the other much shorter, and he scavenged among the ruined cottages until he found a strip of leather, perhaps a belt, and he used the leather to lash the two pieces of timber together. He made a cross. ‘With your permission, lord,’ he told me, ‘I want my own standard.’
‘The son of a king should have a banner,’ I said.
He rammed the butt of the cross on the ground so that it shed ash, and the crosspiece tilted crookedly. It would have been funny if he had not been so bitterly enraged. ‘This is my standard,’ he said, and called for his servant, a deaf-mute named Hwit, to carry the cross.
We followed the hoof tracks south through more burned villages, past a great hall that was now ashes and blackened rafters, and by fields where cattle lowed miserably because they needed milking. If the Danes had left cows behind then they must already have a vast herd, too big to manage, and they must have collected women and children for the slave markets as well. They were encumbered by now. Instead of being a fast, dangerous, well-mounted army of savage raiders they had become a lumbering procession of captives, wagons, herds and flocks. They would still be spewing out vicious raid parties, but each of those would bring back further plunder to slow the main army even more.
They had crossed the Temes. We discovered that next day when we reached Cracgelad where I had killed Aldhelm, Æthelred’s man. The small town was now a burh, and its walls were of stone, not earth and wood. The fortifications were Æthelflaed’s doing, and she had ordered the work done, not only because the small town guarded a crossing of the Temes, but because she had witnessed a small miracle there; touched, she believed, by a dead saint’s hand. So Cracgelad was now a formidable fortress, with a flooded ditch fronting the new stone wall and it was hardly surprising that the Danes had ignored the garrison and instead had headed for the causeway that led across the marshes on the north bank of the Temes to the Roman bridge, which had been repaired at the same time that Cracgelad’s walls had been rebuilt. We also followed the causeway and stood our horses on the northern bank of the Temes and watched the skies burn above Wessex. So Edward’s kingdom was being ravaged. Æthelflaed might have made Cracgelad into a burh, but the town still flew her husband’s banner of the white horse above its southern gate rather than her flag of the cross-grasping goose. A dozen men now appeared at that gate and walked to join us. One was a priest, Father Kynhelm, and he gave us our first reliable news. Æthelwold, he said, was with the Danes. ‘He came to the gate, lord, and demanded we surrender.’
‘You recognised him?’
‘I’ve never seen him before, lord, but he announced himself and I assume he told the truth. He came with Saxons.’
‘Not Danes?’
Father Kynhelm shook his head. ‘The Danes stayed away. We could see them, but as far as I could tell the men at the gate were all Saxons. A lot of them shouted at us to surrender. I counted two hundred and twenty.’
‘And one woman,’ a man added.
I ignored that. ‘How many Danes?’ I asked Father Kynhelm.
He shrugged. ‘Hundreds, lord, they blackened the fields.’
‘Æthelwold’s banner is a stag,’ I said, ‘with crosses for antlers. Was that the only flag?’
‘They showed a black cross as well, lord, and a boar flag.’
‘A boar?’ I said.
‘A tusked boar, lord.’
So Beortsig had joined his masters, which meant that the army plundering Wessex was part Saxon. ‘What answer did you give Æthelwold?’ I asked Father Kynhelm.
‘That we served Lord Æthelred, lord.’
‘You have news of Lord Æthelred?’
‘No, lord.’
‘You have food?’
‘Enough for the winter, lord. The harvest was adequate, God be praised.’
‘What forces do you have?’
‘The fyrd, lord, and twenty-two warriors.’
‘How many fyrd?’
‘Four hundred and twenty, lord.’
‘Keep them here,’ I said, ‘because the Danes will probably be back.’ When Alfred was on his deathbed I had told him that the Northmen had not learned how to fight us, but we had learned how to fight them, and that was true. They had made no attempt to capture Cracgelad, except for a feeble summons for the town to surrender, and if thousands of Danes could not capture one small burh, however formidable its walls, then they had no chance against Wessex’s larger garrisons, and if they could not capture the large burhs and so destroy Edward’s forces inside, then eventually they must retreat. ‘What Danish banners did you see?’ I asked Father Kynhelm.
‘None plainly, lord.’
‘What is Eohric’s banner?’ I asked everyone in earshot.
‘A lion and a cross,’ Osferth said.
‘Whatever a lion is,’ I said. I wanted to know if Eohric’s East Anglians had joined the Danish horde, but Father Kynhelm did not have the answer.
Next morning it was raining again, the drops pitting the Temes as it slid past the burh’s walls. The low cloud made it hard to distinguish the smoke plumes, but my impression was that the fires were not far south of the river. Æthelflaed went to Saint Werburgh’s convent and prayed, Osferth found a carpenter in the town who jointed his cross properly and fixed it with nails, while I summoned two of Merewalh’s men and two of Steapa’s troops. I sent the Mercians to Gleawecestre with a message for Æthelred. I knew that if the message came from me he would ignore it utterly, and so I ordered them to say it was a request from King Edward that he bring his troops, all his troops, to Cracgelad. The great army, I explained, had crossed the Temes at the burh and would almost certainly withdraw the same way. They could, of course, choose another ford or bridge, but men have a habit of using the roads and tracks they already know. If Mercia assembled its army on the northern bank of the Temes then Edward could bring the West Saxons from the south and we would trap them between us. Steapa’s men carried the same message to Edward, except that message came from me and was merely a strong suggestion that as the Danes withdrew he should concentrate his army and follow them, but not attack until they were already crossing the Temes.
It was around mid morning that I gave the order to saddle the horses and be ready to ride, though I did not say to where, then just as we were about to depart two messengers arrived from Bishop Erkenwald in Lundene.
I never liked Erkenwald, while Æthelflaed had hated him ever since he had preached a sermon on adultery and stared at her throughout, but the bishop knew his business. He had sent messengers along every Roman road from Lundene with orders to seek out Mercian or West Saxon forces. ‘He said to keep a watchful eye for you, lord,’ one of the two men said. He was from Weohstan’s garrison and told us that the Danes were outside Lundene’s walls, but not in any great force. ‘If we threaten them, lord, they retreat.’
‘Whose men are they?’
‘King Eohric’s, lord, and a few follow Sigurd’s banner too.’
So Eohric had joined the Danes and not the Christians. Erkenwald’s messengers said they had heard that the Danes had assembled at Eoferwic, and from there they had taken ship
to East Anglia, and while I had been lured to Ceaster, that great army, reinforced by Eohric’s warriors, had launched themselves across the Use and started their path of fire and death. ‘What are Eohric’s men doing at Lundene?’ I asked.
‘They just watch, lord. There aren’t enough of them to make an assault.’
‘But enough to keep troops inside the walls,’ I said. ‘So what does Bishop Erkenwald want?’
‘He hoped you would go to Lundene, lord.’
‘Tell him to send me half of Weohstan’s men instead,’ I said.
Bishop Erkenwald’s request, I suspected it had been couched as an order that the messengers had softened into a suggestion, made small sense to me. True, Lundene needed to be defended, but the army that threatened that city was here, south of the Temes, and if we moved fast we could trap it here. The enemy force at Lundene was probably only there to keep the city’s large garrison from sallying out to confront the great army. My expectation was that the Danes would plunder and burn, but eventually they would either have to besiege a burh or else be fought in the open country by a West Saxon army, and it was more important to know where they were and what they intended than to gather in far Lundene. To defeat the Danes we had to meet them in open battle. There could be no escape from the horrors of the shield wall. The burhs might stave off defeat, but victory came in face-to-face combat, and my thought was to force a battle when the Danes were recrossing the Temes. The one thing I did know was that we had to choose the battlefield, and Cracgelad, with its river, causeway and bridge was as good a place as any, as good as the bridge at Fearnhamme where we had slaughtered the army of Harald Bloodhair after trapping it when only half his troops were across the river.
I gave Erkenwald’s messengers fresh horses and sent them back to Lundene, though without much hope that the bishop would despatch reinforcements unless he received a direct order from Edward, then I led most of our force across the river. Merewalh stayed in Cracgelad, and I had told Æthelflaed to remain with him, but she ignored the order and rode beside me. ‘Fighting,’ I growled at her, ‘is not women’s business.’